About Us
Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit are writers and documentary filmmakers based near Sidney, British Columbia. They specialize in telling stories of the relationships between people and our natural world.
Michael Parfit
Director, photographer, editor, narrator, script writer
Michael was the script writer for the IMAX film Ocean Oasis, which premiered at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in September, 2000, and was awarded Best of Category at the 2001 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, and a Panda Award at Wildscreen 2002. He was the final author of the narration script for the IMAX/ OMNIMAX film Antarctica.
He also co-wrote the script for Under Antarctic Ice, a WNET/Nature production, which premiered on PBS in January, 2003. He is the author of four books and numerous articles for National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines.
Suzanne Chisholm
Producer, director, photographer, script writer
Suzanne has produced, filmed, and written news stories and documentaries in Europe, South America, Africa, Australia, the South Pacific and throughout North America. She received a Bachelor of Arts in economics and history from University of Toronto, and a Master of Development Economics from Dalhousie University.
She taught English in Prague in the early 1990s, and did her graduate thesis research in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Since 1995 she has been working on various projects for National Geographic magazine and the National Geographic Channel-US.
Mountainside Mutts
Meet Max and Cedar, our canine companions and production assistants.
Max is an old time aviator and seafarer. He has travelled on assignment with us all over North America. He's flown in a single engine plane across Canada and the US at least 12 times. He's been as far north as the Arctic Circle in Alaska, as far south as Chiapas, Mexico, and has tasted the salty waters of both the Atlantic and Pacific. He spent a month camping and travelling by Zodiac on the Yukon River. His furry face was featured twice on the "On Assignment" page in National Geographic magazine (Mexico: A Special Issue, August 1996, and the Yukon River, July 1997.)
Cedar is the newest addition to our team. Her first assignment was to travel by boat to the lighthouse at Nootka Island, on Vancouver Island's rugged west coast. We hope the experience of being hoisted up in a bucket on to the dock won't deter her from future travels with us. (She was too young to climb the ladder herself.) Her second assignment was in a single engine Cessna doing aerial photography over Nootka Sound in rough weather. So far, she seems to prefer staying at home. We're not quite sure why.
We haven't yet trained them how to carry our tripods, but we still happily bring them with us whenever we can.
