NHNZ celebrates 100 hours of hit show I Survived…

Media release
13 November 2012

NHNZ celebrates 100 hours of hit show I Survived…

This month Dunedin production house NHNZ delivers its hundredth hour of the hit show I Survived…for A&E’s Bio Channel in the US.

The series, which started six years ago in December, has employed over 100 production staff from New Zealand and the States, and has built up steam in the last 12 months with 40 episodes going out the door. It is the longest run series NHNZ has ever produced; a close second being 77 episodes of the Emmy Award-winning The Most Extreme series for Animal Planet.

Executive Producer Alan Hall says the format has remained the same across the six years, although 2011 saw the introduction of single globally iconic survival stories.

“I Survived… is first person accounts of incredible feats of survival, be it from attempted murder, natural disaster, or animal attacks. But now we are telling other survival stories like 9/11 which premiered in September last year and soon to be aired I Survived…The Taliban and I Survived…The Norway Massacre.”

Hall says the biggest challenge with the show is finding stories that meet the editorial criteria which means survivors had to be agents of their own survival, not someone who invited danger, and had to be ordinary folk going about their daily lives when they were confronted by a life threatening ordeal.

“We focus on the survivors telling their stories in their own words, without extensive recreations or producer manipulation, to establish the authenticity and credibility of the show. We also avoid literal film techniques and use a filmic style that creates in the audience’s imagination the atmosphere of a scene for a particular moment in the story rather than its literal reality. This could be a sense of foreboding or menace, for example, rather than the sound of a gunshot.

“It’s a real tribute to the creative energy and hard work of our team that we continue to deliver great shows that rate well. We are now Bio Channel’s top ratings performer for the nights the show airs.”

With another six hours pending greenlight, taking the number of episodes to 111, Hall says there are still plenty of survival stories to tell.

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