Paul Roy has seen a lot of changes over the course of a 40-year career making films, but one thing has stayed the same: no matter what the technology, or the budget, it’s the story that matters most.

Paul has been working in film since the early seventies, mostly making documentaries which have seen him travel to more than 40 countries and spend eight to nine months on the road every year. He is best-known locally for the 70-minute feature documentary ‘Deer Wars’, about helicopter deer culling in the Southern Alps, and its follow-up, ‘Deer Devils’, which focuses on live deer capture.

Originally from Hamilton, Paul started his working life at the New Zealand government’s National Film Unit (NFU); there was no film school back then, so the NFU served as his first training ground. He then went to the United Kingdom and worked for the BBC on documentaries, something he said gave him an "incredible grounding” in the industry. More than twenty years in Sydney followed, working for SBS Television, ABC TV, and for the German ZDF and ARD networks as a stringer, covering Australasia and the South Pacific."We had amazing freedom back then,” he told the Wanaka App. "They’d say, we’ve got something in Papua New Guinea, and we’d leave the next day.”

Paul has also worked extensively for Al Jazeera, producing the observational documentary ‘Indian Hospital’, which looks at the work of Dr Devi Shetty (one of the world’s top cardiac surgeons, he was Mother Teresa’s specialist), who does surgery on a large scale at the Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital Complex in Bangalore, creating efficiencies that allow the facility to provide world-class surgery on a "pay what you can” model.

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Looking back now, as free online content and reality TV come to dominate our screen time, Paul said he felt fortunate to have enjoyed the career he had and to make a good living at it. "We were really lucky in the period during which we were making films. I’ve been able to always be an independent filmmaker,” he said. "Now, I’ve got ten stories in New Zealand that would be wonderful, but the networks won’t take them. Shows like ‘Piha Rescue’ and ‘Road Cops’ are so cheap to produce.”

Evolving technologies, however, have also had a positive impact, Paul said, extending his working life and allowing him to work more efficiently. "We used to travel with boxes and boxes of equipment,” he said, but in recent years he has been able do a major series by himself with just a backpack, thanks to the shrinking size of camera equipment and HD technology.

Based in Wanaka for the past 13 years, Paul was also able to move here from Sydney with his wife and three children thanks to the advent of online and digital technologies, which meant he didn’t need to live near a major television station anymore.

The forward march of technology has also allowed Paul to set up a new endeavour, Birds Eye Productions, which provides drone video and photography services for a wide range of things including the marketing of real estate, 3D and 2D mapping, structural inspection of buildings, aerial surveys and weddings.

"Drones offer a unique perspective,” Paul said, explaining he first started using them on documentary shoots when they were new to the filmmaking scene and required two operators: one to steer and one to man the camera. Now he can do it on his own, and while he is still working at a high level making films and images for clients - tech or not, he said, you still have to have "the eye” - the drone work affords him a slower pace of life, and time to get out more and enjoy his favourite pastime, tramping.

He also had a crack, on Friday night (November 11), at his first PechuKucha talk at the PechuKucha Night Wanaka in The Rippon Hall. PechuKucha is a presentation style for which a speaker talks to 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each, a format Paul called "a fantastic discipline”. "You have to be pretty ruthless. You have to really focus on what you’re talking about,” he said. 

Whether it’s PechuKucha, drones, or making documentaries for major television networks, Paul said the same thing still matters most: the story. "Don’t worry about the technology. The story is what you’re there for,” he said, pointing out that much of the footage for ‘Deer Wars’ was shot on 8mm film by amateurs, and it was the highest-rated show in New Zealand the year it came out. "You have to have technical excellence, but that doesn’t have to overcome the reason you’re there.”

PHOTO: Supplied