Game and Fish: Exclusive Interview with WebEye Group’s Chris Keig
OutdoorHub Reporters 08.19.13
For years Chris Keig has endeared himself to anglers with the Fly Fishing Film Tour (F3T), but the introduction of the Hunting Film Tour and Kings of Game has officially marked an expansion to all things outdoors. In his own words, Chris started in the mail room at Warren Miller Entertainment, eventually becoming the company’s first television employee and later the Head of Production. Now he heads the WebEye Group, a full-service production facility specializing in action sports and outdoor activities. For the past several years he has tapped into the increasing popularity of collaborative film tours and earned a large following among sportsmen. Building off the success of the Fly Fishing Film Tour, Chris recently launched the Hunting Film Tour. At the same time he will be working on Kings of Game, a bold new YouTube exclusive featuring the Holeman brothers in a hunting and fishing show unlike any other.
We got in touch with Chris and talked to him about his new projects.
OutdoorHub: How did Kings of Game with the Holeman brothers come about?
Chris Keig: We met the Holeman brothers through the Fly Fishing Film Tour and they were on several of our pieces. We realized that they were way more into hunting and fishing rather than just fly fishing, which is where we came up with the idea for the show.
The goal was to show the audience two unique characters, so what we did was try to present the Holeman brothers as characters outside of just hunting and fishing–but they have a lot of fun doing what they do. That’s kind of how the show came about. They are really tight brothers, they’re getting outdoors and they’re having fun. We want to break the mold.
A trailer for Kings of Game can be seen below:
The guys who make the show, Waterline Media, also work with us on F3T. They are super energetic and do the production work. As for the filming, it really takes a lot of work to get all these people in one place. It takes work on our end to also find these third-party characters, or local characters, for the show. A lot of the show depends on the ability of the Holeman brothers to build off each other.
The first episode of Kings of Game can viewed in its entirety below:
http://youtu.be/DVirp3BAVY4
How did you get started on the film tours?
Basically about seven years we (Chris and Doug Powell) were working at Warren Miller, and we were approached by AEG who ended up selling us the fly fishing portion of the film tour. We applied the Warren Miller model to these shows. Fast forward to 2013, we’re now doing over 150 shows. This year, now that we’ve really sold the idea, we’re going to be spreading to other models. Our newest will be the Hunting Film Tour, which will be starting this month.
Below is a trailer for the Hunting Film Tour:
How do films make it into the tours?
The way it works is we do our film tours by submission. For F3T, the films are created by other people who are at their core fishermen, and through experience we began to understand our crowd. There’s four or five guys who make the film tour every year. They get it, they know the drill. Then there’s another four or five filmmakers that I work very closely with to fine-tune their piece to better fit our touring model. We’re not making documentaries. Our audience is going to want to have fun and see something to cheer over.
We do it on a committee basis right now, the way it works is people send in trailers. From the trailers I can already see if someone will make it into the tour. We have a great program for compensation. Then Doug and I go through the films to narrow them down. For long-form submissions a committee of our peers help to sift through the submissions, eventually leading to the final few films. At that point we’ll fine-tune.
An overview of the 2013 Fly Fishing Film Tour:
We’d like to thank Chris for giving us the time to interview him and you can find more of his videos on his YouTube channel. Kings of Game can also be seen here.
Editor’s note: This interview is part of a series with OutdoorHub’s featured video partners. Click here to read our interview with kayak angler Isaac Brumaghim, and click here to read our interview with inventor and tinkerer Marque Cornblatt.
