Tag Archives: Ottawa

Take a four-hour tour with TVO’s Tripping the Rideau Canal

Honestly, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. With Canadians—and the world—being encouraged to stay inside as much as possible, Tripping the Rideau Canal comes along to fill a goodly chunk of time for those abiding by the rules and hunkering down.

Debuting Friday at 7 p.m. on TVO (and available to stream on TVO.org) the four-hour documentary—yes, you read that right—plops viewers into a seat in a 1948 mahogany Shepard runabout and takes them on a real-time ride on a 27-kilometre stretch of the canal into Ottawa. The doc is the brainchild of executive producer, writer and director Mitch Azaria, whose Good Earth Productions has made series like Canada: A Magnificient Journey, Great Canadian Parks and Great Canadian Lakes.

And if four hours aboard a boat seems boring, it’s not. Tripping the Rideau Canal is equal parts boat ride and history lesson, as facts about the canal and the area surrounding it flit on-screen every few minutes.

We chatted with Mitch Azaria about the show’s seeds and the challenges he faced filming a four-hour, non-stop production.

I’ve driven parallel to the Rideau Canal for years, so this really opened my eyes to it. How did you end up doing this for TVO?
Mitch Azaria: Ironically I’d actually made a doc about the Rideau Canal a long time ago, but it was so long ago that I’d forgotten about it. I went to Ottawa University, so I always thought that the Rideau Canal went from Carleton University to downtown. I didn’t realize that it’s over 200 kilometres long, it goes from Kingston to Ottawa, when it was built or why. I didn’t know any of that.

We were talking with TVO and they kept saying, ‘We’d like to do something that’s in real-time and we don’t have commercials so we can just put something on for a really long time.’ And we thought, ‘What broadcaster says that to an independent producer? It’s the greatest thing you can do.’ We figured out pretty quickly it would have to be some kind of journey where the viewer feels like they’re taking a trip. It couldn’t be static, it would have to be in motion. We had a list of 10 places in Ontario that we thought would be interesting and that ranged from train trips to highway trips to boat trips. We’d got it down to the Welland Canal and the Rideau Canal and we went with a small camera, shot footage of both and presented it to TVO. We knew already that we liked the Rideau Canal, but we didn’t want to influence them. And they picked the Rideau Canal too. So there we were.

It’s very relaxing and part of the fun is the history lesson.
MA: It’s the oldest continuously operated canal in North America. There’s a lot of interesting parts about the history, but what I find the coolest is that you get to a lock. The men and women that are working the lock, they’re Parks Canada people, because the Rideau Canal is under Parks Canada.

The cranks that they’re turning and the operation that they’re running is the same one that’s been in operation for almost 200 years. The actual handle that they’re hand cranking, everything other than the doors, all the metal works, all the internal work, even the stones that the canals are made out of. Because it’s UNESCO World Heritage Site, they have to go and get the stones from the quarries that are now 150 years closed. They have to go and find those old quarries and take the stone out of those old quarries, so they match the stone that was put there 200 years ago.

Let’s talk about some logistics. I guess it was natural for you to start at the dam at the beginning rather than further up the chain?
MA: John Morrison was the director, and he and I spent a crazy amount of time on the canal trying to figure out all of these things, including a starting point that would be exactly four hours from the end. We weren’t smart enough to figure out anything more than, let’s go four hours back and start.

What about motor noise? Was that ever going to be an issue?
MA: It was going to be a real issue, and we had two sound men that all they did was try and figure out how to avoid that. So, they had everything pointed forward and they had figured out a way to keep everything in front of us.

What are some issues you came across during filming?
MA: We thought we asked every question and every technical issue to make sure that we could run for four hours. And one of the things that came up as we’re running and sort of live, we’re shooting, is the boat operator said, ‘Geez, we’re probably going to have to stop a few times because of these weeds.’ And we went, ‘What do you mean weeds?’ We thought we asked every question. Can the batteries last long enough? Will the camera run long enough? Are the cards long enough that we’re recording on? Do we have enough gas? That’s the one question. So yeah, there were a couple of little hitches that we didn’t count on, but that’s the way it goes.

Get some extra behind-the-scenes footage on filming on the show’s website.

Tripping the Rideau Canal airs Friday at 7 p.m. on TVO.

Images courtesy of the TVO original, Tripping the Rideau Canal

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Amazing Racers put the “fun” in Fundy

And just like that, we’re down to the final three teams on The Amazing Race Canada. After thousands of miles and millions of footsteps, Olympians Meaghan and Natalie, best buds Mickey and Pete and co-workers Ryan and Rob will face off in Sunday’s season finale in Ottawa where one team will claim the grand prize.

Unfortunately, not in the running for the cash, cars and other baubles are siblings Sukhi and Jinder, who arrived on the mat in last place on the windy coast of New Brunswick and were eliminated.

“We feel so blessed that we got to do 11 Legs,” Jinder told host Jon Montgomery. “Now that we’ve done this race, I don’t want our lives to be any less extraordinary.” I really have to acknowledge how the pair evolved throughout the season. In the beginning, they were plagued by nerves and missed easy clues and got lost often, but as the Legs continued they became stronger and more cohesive. Sadly, a case of one red traffic light may have been the reason they were cut.

After placing first in Prince Edward Island, Sukhi and Jinder were the first to depart from Charlottetown. Their haste to get out of town and across the Confederation Bridge led to driving through a red light … and into a 15-minute penalty. They could only watch as Meaghan and Natalie and Mickey and Pete drove past and into the lead. The Olympians and the best friends arrived at and completed the Dairy Queen serving challenge and got to the Detour card location within seconds of each other. Both teams–and, as it turned out, all four–chose the Flag It task, a horribly complex thing where maritime flags denoting different nautical messages had to be hoisted up a flag pole in a certain order.

The difficulty of the test–so many flags looked exactly the same–meant that all four teams ended up in the muck surrounding the Hopewell Rocks in the Bay of Fundy at the same time, struggling to figure out why they weren’t given the green light to advance to rock climbing and, eventually, the mat. Meaghan and Natalie were the first to realize what they had done wrong and sprinted off to another first-place finish. Mickey and Pete were next, followed by Ryan and Rob and Sukhi and Jinder. The co-workers’ few seconds head start meant the difference between them placing third and advancing to Sunday’s finale.

At this point it looks like Meaghan and Natalie may have this whole thing sewn up. But, as evidenced in The Amazing Race franchise, one small slip can mean the difference between champs and chumps.

The Amazing Race Canada season finale airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CTV followed by an After the Race special.

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