Chilhowie hunters create TV show

BY WAYNE QUESENBERRY

MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE

and CHRISTINE UTHOFF

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Hunting is a passion for friends Matthew Lewis and Wes Eller, who take to the field any time they can escape their day jobs. Watching others hunt on television isn’t so bad either.

Somewhere along the line, Lewis decided to take his own video camera on the hunt. That was 2005 and “it just kind of evolved,” he said.

The result of that evolution debuts Saturday. “Lewis and Clark Adventures” is a reality hunting show he produced using that footage and lots of help from Eller and other friends. The show has 13 episodes that will air at 8:30 p.m. every Saturday on Tri-Cities CW4.

“It takes hunting to a whole new level,” Lewis said of lugging his filming gear – including high-definition cameras – alongside his guns. “Now, you’ve got a camera in your hand, and it becomes – almost – more about getting the footage than getting the shot.”

Eller expressed a similar zeal: “You’re not just hunting, you’re trying to capture everything you experience out there.”

They capture it for themselves, for their friends and now for a regional audience they dream might become national.

“We’re hopeful that this is just a launching pad for what we could do in the future,” Eller said.

The duo and their friends – including Wayne Kirby III of Max Meadows, Va., and Brian Reynolds, who owns the show’s corporate sponsor, Custom Air Heating & Cooling in Marion – filmed hundreds of hours of footage to create the series of 30-minute episodes. And they’re already working on the second season.

“We want to have a good time, but we’re trying to produce quality TV stuff too,” Lewis said. “We want it to be good.”

The shows include hunting for deer and turkey in Southwest Virginia, and trips to Wyoming and South Dakota and North Carolina. Still, they want to keep the focus local.

“Ninety-eight percent of the hunts were in Southwest Virginia,” Kirby said. “We did some in Wythe County and Bland County and Grayson County.”

After all, Lewis said, they’re trying to do a show for folks like themselves: Those who do something else for a living, but can’t wait for the end of the day or the end of the week to get outdoors.

“On most of our shows, we talk about just getting off work,” said Lewis, who owns and operates the Lewis & Clark Outdoors store in Chilhowie.

“That was a lot of our idea behind the show,” Eller, the pastor at Cleghorn Baptist Church just outside of Chilhowie, said of focusing on evening and weekend hunts.

“I’d love to be able to hunt every day, but I can’t,” Eller said. “I hunt when I can. This is something that we can enjoy – and we enjoy sharing it.”

The team even filmed the commercials for their advertisers and sponsors.

“The local companies that are supporting us, they were really excited about it and came right on board,” Eller said. “It was kind of amazing.”

Of course, it’s been a lot of work all around, they said.

On the hunt, “all of a sudden, you turn into a field producer,” Lewis said.

And, Eller added, “everything you do has to tell a story.”

They recruited friends and family to carry the gear and help in the filming. Then Lewis did the editing, boiling down all that video into 30-minute shows.

It was a bit more work than they anticipated, they said. But they wouldn’t have it any other way.

They can’t help but dream they might eventually be that guy in hunting gear whispering to the camera about a big buck or wild turkey in the brush.

“It’s just what you do,” Lewis said. “You watch it and you dream that some day you’re going to be doing what they’re doing.”

And now that they’ve started, they don’t plan to give up.

“It’s the big thing now,” Kirby, a New River Valley Regional Jail corrections officer, said of the hunting shows. “We plan to continue doing it and have a good chance of going national.

“It may take a couple years,” Kirby said. “We tried to tell a good story.”

wquesenberry@wythenews.com | (276) 228-6611

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