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set up was $30,000, our little camera was about $7,000 and the drone was about $4,000. That stuff varies in price, and it gets cheaper and cheaper, but still. People can get an action camera and go do some stuff on their own, but it’s not the same as putting together a high quality fishing show with a professional editor.”
Chapman’s show, Brent Chapman’s Pro vs. Joe, debuted last spring–online. The concept is simple: Chapman, the “Pro” takes on a challenger, the “Joe” on his or her local lake of choice. Altogether, with a team of four—his wife Bobbi and west coast videographers Tom Leogrande and Anthony Crivelli— Chapman managed to film 13 shows and grow from a self-funded adventure to a fully-sponsored endeavor that receives several hundred applications from challengers every week.
Entering 2016, the team is fielding offers to take the show from an online-only production on to television. In other words—if you’re an angler with dreams of your own TV show, this is the blueprint.
But a blueprint is only a plan, and plans go awry. “I kind of got sucked into it,” Chapman says. “My wife is my business partner, and it was her and Tom’s creation more than anything. They came up with the idea and said, ‘let’s go film.’” From there, the 2012 Bassmaster Angler of the Year embarked on a series of hard-learned lessons. “I love to bow hunt, and I love watching bow hunting videos. I always asked myself how hard it could be to go film a hunt, but when you actually see there’s high-tech cameras and all of that HD stuff, you see it’s a lot different than just taking your cell phone out and making a video with it.”
The first two shows carried the steepest learning curve. There, at Louisiana’s Lake Caddo and Arizona’s Apache, he discovered how much time it takes to really create something worthwhile.
“It’s one day to film a show,” says Chapman. “What people may not realize is at the end of that day, you have two or three cameras rolling for eight
or 10 hours,
so there’s 25-30 hours’
worth of content that
you’ve got to fit into
a 22 or 28 minute
show, and you’ve got
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