NORMANDY, FRANCE — It’s a beautiful day in Normandy. The rolling hills, lush vegetation and occasional rundown chalet paint a pastoral picture worthy of exhibition in the Louvre.
Inside a black Mercedes minibus, however, dark clouds are gathering over the 20-odd passengers. Despite the local driver, the GPS, the maps and the ever-helpful Google, we are lost.
Oh well, it’s The Amazing Race Canada: What else would you expect?
It’s a scout day, which means the executive team from Insight Productions, which produces the popular reality series for CTV, is in the midst of a dry run of what the racers will experience the next day. They’re working on the seventh episode of Season 2. (It aired Tuesday, three months after it was shot. CTV brought me to France so I could write on the series’ second outing outside the borders of Canada.)
We’ve been on the road since 8:15 a.m. and haven’t reached the first stop of the day. It’s a few hours in and we’ve hit a snag: a road that was open yesterday is now closed. Will it be closed tomorrow?
This is what today is for: finding those roadblocks — not all of them so literal — before they happen and coming up with alternatives.
Take, for example, the beach-sailing challenge on tomorrow’s agenda. What’s the wind forecast? What do the tide charts say? Will there be enough beach to run the course if one team is hours behind the others? What about getting kayaks so cameras could film the action from the water? Would cameras in the theoretical kayaks add to the viewing experience? Would there be a safety team available to staff said still-undecided-upon kayaks?
“Everything that happens on the show is considered,” says Amazing Race Canada supervising producer Mark Lysakowski.
(Well, as much as it can be. The next day, a soundman updates the 30-person group chat that updates staffers on what’s what. He’s with Team 9, a.k.a. Ryan and Rob, and they’re travelling in the wrong direction, so much so that they’re not even on the map handed out to the production team. “He thinks he sees Mount Fuji in the distance, that’s how lost they are,” is read aloud to much laughter and a few moans.)
Lysakowski isn’t kidding about sweating the details. While on the bus (we eventually overcome that closed-road obstacle), he and the art director discuss which bowl to use in a challenge on the next leg. It’s hardly crucial to the task, but they pore over pictures of five or six options.
“We create the frame and put in a canvas. We give it to them to paint. What they create is up to them,” Lysakowski says of building the environment in which the Race will take place.
Making the always-on-the-move series — nearly 50,000 kilometres covered this season — is a logistical beast. (Host Jon Montgomery refers to it as a “leviathan.”) It’s like a Jack-in-the-box perpetual motion machine: the handle is always cranking, but you’re never quite sure when that joker is going to pop up. Oh, look: Mickey and Pete went through the wrong lane at a toll booth driving from Paris to Normandy. Pop goes the weasel!
Montgomery is on the scouting tour as well. The former Olympian gets to exercise more than his grey matter, however. He’s the guinea pig for many a challenge on the Race, from skydiving in Victoria to rocking out on a Winnipeg stage to mushing in the Yukon. It’s all recorded and posted on the show’s website in “Jon’s Blog,” along with his musings on the goings-on.
On Race Day in Normandy, Montgomery sits down for a quick chat in the lobby of the Juno Beach Centre, the Pit Stop for this leg. The pace is staggering, the pressure is unrelenting. Meaghan and Natalie, sure, they’re superhuman hockeybots, they can take it. But what about all the working stiffs who are in it for the long haul, all 29 days of the shoot?
“This This isn’t for everybody. If it were easy, everybody would do it. It’s not for the faint of heart,” Montgomery says. “They are long days but we are committed to the course of action … This day is long, but guess what? It’s going to happen. We are going to get everybody here; we’re going to go home. And then we will move on and do it all over again.”
And here’s a tidbit to keep in mind when you’re watching the show: production people are everywhere. For example, in the small town of Le Molay Littry, racers search for the clue box by City Hall. That green hedge a few metres away conceals not only a production assistant, but another production person, myself, the staff photographer and two PR people. The magic of TV!
When Meaghan and Natalie tear through the tapestry challenge at Bayeux, more than a few of the folks lounging around in the courtyard are involved in the show. (Look for the ones studiously not looking at the cameras.) When one of the twins darted around the side of the barn to relieve himself, he was stopped short by the group of six people standing there already.
One staffer likens it to rolling FBI surveillance: there’s always someone, sight unseen, watching the teams. Again, it’s all about keeping tabs on the racers as they perform spontaneously in a somewhat controlled environment. If they do something wrong, they do it wrong. There are no do-overs here, no second takes when the Race is running.
What’s palpable watching the teams in real time is the sense of panic they overtakes them when they’re unsure of something. Whereas someone not competing in front of the cameras might slow down and take a measured moment or two, the teams feel a need to be constantly in motion.
Capturing every second of this action takes a small army. There are 75-80 staff along for the entire Race, in addition to the local hires.
Heck, one person’s job is to look after the GoPro cameras the Racers and Montgomery strap on that give viewers those point-of-view shots.
And, if an army travels on its stomach, The Amazing Race Canada travels on its gear.
In addition to the usual suitcases and backpacks (all 73 pieces of them), there’s 40 pieces of equipment needed to make the show, weighing in at more than 950 kilograms. Then there’s the cargo: 160 pieces, approximately 4,817 kilograms’ worth. This season, there was an added wrinkle: carnet, which is like a passport for goods. Since the series left the borders of Canada to travel to China and France, every piece of that professional equipment had to be accounted for in the carnet.
All that gear is put to good use: more than 1,000 hours of footage was shot to create the 12 one-hour episodes that make up Season 2. During filming, it’s constantly sent back to Toronto, where a production team works to whittle the action and drama down to less than 12 hours of TV.
“It’s the largest, hardest show, I’ve ever worked on. It has a million moving parts. We span three continents and have more than 120 people working on it,” says John Brunton, the show’s executive producer (and CEO and chair of Insight Productions). “It’s like doing a live network show every 12 to 36 hours.”
