A stretch of the North Shore near Silver Bay served as a stand-in for Montana’s Glacier National Park on an ABC television show earlier this month.
Committee Films, a film production company based out of Minneapolis, was at the Silver Bay Marina last fall to film an episode for their docudrama show “In an Instant,” which re-creates stories of survival, marrying re-enactments of the incidents with interviews of the survivors. The episode filmed in Silver Bay was about a father and daughter who survived a grizzly attack in Glacier National Park.
“Filming in Silver Bay was a great opportunity,” said Maria Awes, senior vice president of Committee Films. “I think that Silver Bay offered the perfect backdrop for the scenes that we were able to shoot.”
Awes said the company prefers to keep filming in Minnesota to support the state’s economy, and the jagged rocks, cliffs and water of Silver Bay served as a good local stand-in for Glacier.
Maria Awes and her husband, Andy, have produced TV shows for History, Travel Channel, National Geographic Channel and H2. “In an Instant” is their broadcast network TV debut.
Jeremy Kasapidis, manager of the Silver Bay Marina, was the location contact for the filming company. He also was an extra in the episode.
“It’s my debut,” Kasapidis said with a laugh last week.
Kasapidis called the experience “really positive.”
“We’d love to have filming crews up again,” he said. “It was a lot of fun.”
The bears shown in the episode are real, and have extensive resumes in Hollywood films and TV shows. Awes said it was a bit difficult to find a location willing to host the bears, but Kasapidis said he wasn’t worried.
“The trainers are really professional and we had a lot of trust in them,” he said.
Awes said being so close to grizzlies made her more connected to the story of the hikers that the episode was telling.
“The power, the size of the paw, the gait of the bear, the way it walked … and imagining that coming up at you,” she said. “What wasn’t lost on us was the power of the animal.”
Still, Awes said, the point of the story was not to paint grizzlies as villains.
“This grizzly was just protecting her cubs,” Awes said. “That’s quite likely what led to this attack.”
Awes said the subjects of “In an Instant” have been pleased with how the episodes turned out.
“In every case, the people who we interviewed have been thrilled with the way their stories have been represented,” she said. “It was a lot of hours of research to figure out all of the details.”
The grizzly episode already aired on ABC, but it’s available to watch online at abc.go.com/shows/in-an-instant, and probably will be shown as a rerun.
“In an Instant” has drawn about 4 million viewers for each episode. The remaining episodes in the series will air at 8 p.m. Saturdays. In addition to the grizzly episode filmed in Lake County, the show has covered the 2007 Interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, a man trapped in a grain bin and a woman beaten and left for dead.
