Two creative forces have united to produce the perfect storm of still and moving pictures in Newfoundland and Labrador.

They are Roger Maunder and David Howells. One is a born-and-raised Newfoundlander who has cemented his role as an accomplished and prolific filmmaker; the other’s a globe-trotting Wales native who has photographed some of the most famous faces on earth.

But don’t take our word for it—check out their work online (upskydownfilms.com and davehowellsphoto.com). Be sure to pour yourself a cuppa first, because you could be there for a while. First, there’s a lot of content. Second, it’s going to grab your attention.

If you’ve seen still portraits of business, political and opinion leaders—local to international—you’ve no doubt seen Howells’ distinctive style. Maunder’s work is all over TV and the Internet, for clients like Alan Doyle, 2025 Canada Games, Stella’s Circle and hundreds more. If you’ve watched the moving and important Forgotten Warriors documentary, you’ve seen their guiding influence. If you were dazzled by the sheer fabulousness of St. John’s Fashion Week, they were behind much of that, too. If your jaw has ever dropped at the startling still and video imagery released by Opera on the Avalon, that’s also their work.

Always loved film

It’s a pair of long and winding career paths that led to this creative union. Born and raised in St. John’s, Maunder has been drawn to movies for as long as he can remember, largely through the influence of his mother, also a film buff. She stayed up to date with home video technology, utilizing whatever was in vogue at the time, from laser discs to VHS tapes, while also making frequent excursions to local movie theatres.

“I used to skip school, pretending I was sick, knowing she would be going to the movies that day,” Maunder said. “And then, I would just end up at the mall and she would let me watch movies with her. So I was able to see all these crazy films.”

When old enough to leave home, Maunder struck out in 1993 for Hollywood to work as an actor, armed with nothing but his own ambition and a handsome face—he had no agent, credits or even a mug shot.

“Yeah, I almost starved,” Maunder laughs. He eventually returned to St. John’s to regroup, before setting off for the Toronto scene to try again. This time, he landed a role in a Molson ‘I am Canadian’ beer commercial, where he came off a plane and hugged his waiting girlfriend.

“That actually paid money and for a number of years, through residuals, so that was cool.”

Maunder then landed a position as body double for Aussie actor Cameron Daddo, who had a lead role in F/X: The Series. “I would stand-in for him when the shoots were back on, and I was learning so much and kind of soaking it up like a sponge.”

One role in particular caught his interest: the director of photography, or DP. When he finished with F/X, Maunder returned to St. John’s, where someone told him about the Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Cooperative, or Nifco.

“I didn’t even know about Nifco prior to that, or the fact that I could take a film class there and produce a short film for next to nothing.”

Nifco was a game changer. Maunder completed the filmmaking course but never really left the building, volunteering on film crews for whatever production was happening, including numerous first films for other students. “I pretty much owe everything to Nifco, to be honest. I ended up getting a job there as the first filmmaker mentor. It started part time and soon became full time. I think we were doing a film every weekend for a while. We were shooting on 16mm film then, which was phenomenal, but the thing about film is, you send it away and don’t get it back for a week or two.”

Maunder worked under a who’s who of film mentors, including Paul Pope, Mike Jones, Derek Norman, Jennice Ripley, John Doyle, and others. “I remember the best piece of advice I got was from Paul Pope, who said, ‘Don’t f**k it up.’ And there was a long checklist of things where you could do that.”

In 2001, fueled by big ideas and not a lot of money, Maunder launched the Nickel Independent Film Festival, named after the former Nickel Theatre. The festival continues to this day and has become a mainstay on the local filmmaking scene. In 2007, Maunder wrote Mundy Pond, his debut novel based loosely on the neighbourhood where he grew up. It’s still simmering on his back burner as a possible movie project.

The creative community in St. John’s is small and word about Maunder’s abilities spread into the commercial and corporate world. He started doing work with Wavelight, a division of m5, and never looked back, eventually forming Up Sky Down Films in 2004 to begin capturing his own stories.

Over its 20-year existence, Up Sky Down Films has focused on local people, events and businesses, from music videos to feature films to documentary journalism to corporate productions. The company has well over 200 works to its credit, many viewable in the website’s portfolio section. They even use drone video, so the sky is not the limit.

Aside from encouraging young people to explore opportunities in filmmaking, Maunder does have one word of warning for them, and he expresses this with a little smile in his voice.

“Knowing the process from the inside out ruins the enjoyment of watching movies for you. It’s like, just be prepared because there is no turning back. You are thinking about lighting, sound, continuity. And when there’s action, you’re thinking about the special effects. But you know what? I still get sucked into the story anyway, especially when it’s a good movie with great performances!”

Wales to the world

During the interview, Howells expressed several times how lucky he has been, even stating at one point that he was lucky to be alive.

“I’ve always said that I wasn’t meant to survive as a child,” Howells said. “I didn’t even have a name for two weeks. I was a premature baby in the 1960s. My mother lost two children in childbirth from similar issues. I was lucky number three. It’s funny, I’ve always believed that you make your own luck but there’s a certain advantage in knowing that you probably shouldn’t be here.”

Howells doesn’t feel any great affinity to his Wales birth-place because he has traveled so much over his lifetime. His father’s profession as a land surveyor involved a lot of travel, including to the Caribbean, then the bushlands of Africa. He met his wife (a Newfoundlander) more than 30 years ago and settled in the United Kingdom. He was a latecomer to photography, first picking up the craft at age 26, after attempting to earn a degree in geography.

The photography skill seems to run in his family. His father was an accomplished amateur photographer and his great uncle was an aerial photographer during World War I, assigned to fly reconnaissance and capture photos over enemy territory.

“The intelligence was that the fighter squadron on the German side had moved so it was presumed safe to fly. Of course, they didn’t know that the Red Baron’s squad had moved into the area the day before. So he goes up there with his pilot and they were shot down and killed by the Red Baron’s wingman.”

Howells found his great uncle’s grave recently during a video and photo shoot in Europe. More on that later.

Upon entering his photography career, Howells got lucky. Rather than start at the bottom, he debuted at the top, as staff photographer with Southwest News Service, one of the largest and most respected news syndicates in the world. He was jet-setting around the world, often on short notice, to capture portraits of famous people or cover unfolding news events. In his heyday, Howells was flying 100,000 miles per year.

Over this 20-year career, Howells photographed famous politicians, actors, musicians and more; among them former president George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Hilary Clinton, Roger Waters, Amy Whitehouse, Lou Reed, Salman Rushdie, Gordon Ramsay, Dog the Bounty Hunter and many others.

He was a good photographer at the time, but still on the lower end of his learning curve. And Howells leaped into the deep end with both feet, despite not having a lot of career accreditations or credentials.

“You know, people don’t quite understand how photography works. You can go to journalism or photography school, but this is an experience-based profession. Nothing beats experience. My wife used to say, when I was in the news business, the first and the last day are exactly the same. No shoot is the same. It’s all moving parts, all the time.”

Perhaps the most important skill he learned in those early days was how to wring a singularly good photograph out of a chaotic situation. “You know, I actually love the chaos of when things aren’t going quite right. It shakes you out of complacency.”

The chaos was compounded by another factor—time—of which there was precious little. Famous people have little patience for messing about so he learned to be efficient during that brief moment. “It was usually myself and a writer, and you had to come up with something very good, very different, and in a matter of seconds. One time I photographed George W. Bush in Dallas, who was giving one interview to a European paper, and it happened to be the one I was on contract with. They said, ‘The good news, you have an hour. The bad news is, the writer has 59 minutes of that.’ So I had one minute to produce his photograph.”

Howells’ specialty was moving beyond physical portraiture into snapping that quicksilver moment when the essence of the subject is revealed. For this reason, whenever a famous person dies, the obituary portrait used will often be a file photo by Howells, if one exists.

“If I photograph someone famous I can pretty much guarantee that editors will use that portrait in the obituary. People have actually joked that they don’t want me to photograph them because it’ll probably end up… well, you know.”

Readers are encouraged to visit his website and browse the portrait galleries. While there, check out the natural environment and even the wedding photography. (If you think there’s no originality to be found in wedding photography, that it’s all been done before, you are in for a surprise.)

The photojournalism all ground to a halt in 2012 when markets crashed and advertising budgets evaporated. Assignments were suddenly rare, so when Howells’ wife reminded him of his promise to move back to Newfoundland at some point, that seemed like the right time.

Word spread quickly that a world class photographer had touched down in the province, and corporate and commercial work soon came his way.

“My wife said that having a fake British accent has really done well for me here,” he quips. “But seriously, Newfoundland is a unique place, creatively, and it has been wonderful for my career. You can do so much here. The opportunities are incredible. I don’t know what I would be doing if I lived elsewhere and I’m really enjoying it here. Newfoundland is probably the best place in the world to raise children, too.”

Converging paths

It was bound to happen eventually: Maunder and Howells met through a mutual client, Wavelight, when Howells was doing mug shots for the creative team.

“We hit it off,” Maunder said. “And then, we had to do a video shoot for a client. Dave had never shot video before so we had him doing some of that. That was the first time.”

Picking up a video camera made sense at the time, even though it went a little against the grain for Howells. “The problem is, video has to be done in real time. It can seem like it takes forever. But with photographic stills, not so much. I can go in and get that done in five minutes. To get what you need on video, you need a team of a dozen people, doing lighting, sound, cameras, whatever. Roger would be shooting video and I was sitting there, huffing and puffing that he was taking so long to do it. So I picked up a camera and helped shooting some B roll. And then some more…”

Up to then, Howells was accustomed to being a lone wolf; an independent artist who called his own shots.

“I’m a control freak,” Howells said, laughing. “I’m normally not a team player. But I do enjoy (shooting video). It’s another arrow in my quiver. Loads of photographers end up being cinematographers or directors because they understand how light works. if you can do a still photo, you can do a moving picture. Creating a beautiful photo is obviously the first thing, but then, what would make a beautiful video?”

Maunder and Howells first worked together in 2020 but that was mostly coincidental. Their first major project as a creative collaboration was with Opera on the Avalon in 2021.

“I think in 2020 we were both in the mindset of ‘I do stills, hurry up Roger with your stupid video’, and by 2021 that had morphed into ‘I’ll help you hurry up with your stupid video!’ And I think we realised that by helping each other, something better always happens.”

Maunder and Howells are the nucleus of a creative team that frequently draws in other collaborators, including video shooters Drew Kennedy and Curtis Jones, costume designer Keith Roberts, makeup artist Allison Best and others.

Opera by and for us

Opera on the Avalon (OOTA) was formed in 2009 as a response to the traditional male domination of opera. The organization is led by women and believes in equity, diver-sity, inclusiveness and accessibility. They are turning the idea of traditional opera on its ear through the commissioning of new and innovative live and digital works.

Cheryl Hickman, general and artistic director of OOTA, said they were forced to rethink their programming model when Covid shut down live performances in 2020. “We were trying to figure out how to keep people employed. It was difficult to tell people that we had no work for them. So we had to think really quickly about how to envision projects that could be produced with social distance. Dave used to photograph our shows and Roger would do our video projects. That was when we decided to work together as a creative team to produce The Rock Performs, a digital series.”

Three editions of The Rock Performs were since produced; featuring striking, at times jaw dropping video and still photographs that tie OOTA members and other Newfoundland and Labrador artists into the landscape, culture and history of the province. They can be viewed through the Opera on the Avalon channel on YouTube.

“The Rock Performs was a barrel of fun and it allowed us to be creative in ways that I think we hadn’t thought possible before,” Hickman said. “That’s how our artistic collaboration began and we are now on season four of The Rock Performs, and have done other projects as well. … The Rock Performs is based in the digital sphere and this generation really consumes culture in a different way than my generation did, so we tried to make each segment four minutes or less. Sometimes it’s opera, sometimes it’s music and sometimes it’s dance. What started off as a small digital festival has really transformed so much of the work that we do, and we are doing more and more collaborations with Roger and Dave.”

To date, video and photo shoots have been staged in Bonavista, Burin, Gros Morne National Park, L’Anse aux Meadows, St. John’s, and overseas, in Ireland and France.

Maunder and Howells like to joke around to keep the atmosphere light, but when the work starts, everyone becomes hyper focused. (“We don’t take ourselves seriously, but we take our work seriously,” Maunder said.)

Sometimes, the work can be intensely serious, such as when the crew traveled to Beaumont Hamel last year with OOTA to record a commemorative video at the hallowed site. They had permission to record video in the trenches there and at Vimy.

“We were about 10 minutes away from Beaumont Hamel when everyone in the car went quiet,” Maunder said. “You could feel something. I have often seen people get emotional about Beaumont Hamel but wasn’t prepared for this. When we got there, it was just so emotional… like a heaviness in the air. We felt a lot of pressure shooting that video because we were representing the Regiment. It had to be good.”

That feeling was echoed by Howells, who had just come from visiting the grave of his great uncle, the aerial photographer who had been shot down by the Red Baron’s wingman. As it turned out, his pilot that day was a Canadian. “I was a basket case… an absolute mess,” Howells said. “I was completely overwhelmed.”

After a fashion

There was a lot of buzz earlier this year about St. John’s Fashion Week, a new event founded by Nunatsiavut Inuk Jessica Brown to help position the capital city as a leading fashion destination. The week featured several runway shows, the most jaw dropping being the show at The Rooms by indigenous designers, which featured fashion that was truly world class in its originality.

Many Fashion Week photos and videos were captured by Maunder and Howells, who were also hip deep in planning and coordinating the event. This involved several weeks of advance work that began to snowball as the event drew nearer.

“It was like, if we are going to do this, then it can’t look like an amateur event,” Howells said. “It has to be done properly.”

“The closer we got to it, we realized we were going to do way more than we thought we would,” Maunder said.

“It was enormous fun,” Howells added. “But I aged 10 years in about three weeks, and I never want to do that again.”

“It was a bucket list thing,” Maunder said, “but if we ever do anything like that again, it’s not going to be a week, it’ll be a night!”

Footage was captured for a “making of” Fashion Week documentary that is now being edited. It promises to be a visual extravaganza.

Forgotten warriors

In April of 2024, a documentary film was released telling the little-known story of the Mi’kmaq activists of Conne River who changed the course of Indigenous history in the province. The Forgotten Warriors (forgottenwarriorsnl.com) profiles the nine individuals who held a hunger strike to protest the denial of provincial funding that was rightfully theirs. It is a powerful, informative and emotional work, and Maunder and Howells played a key role in its creation.

Noel Joe of Conne River was active in advocacy and politics when he had an idea. He had heard plenty growing up about the hunger strike, in which five of his uncles participated. “I knew it would be nice to tell that story, on screen or on film,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to do that. I realized I was going to need some help with this.”

He talked to friends who had worked on films, who pointed him in various directions. He was watching local music videos on YouTube one day when he saw a credit for Up Sky Down Films. He tracked down Maunder and reached out.

“I told him I had this great story and wanted to make a documentary about it… He said ‘Amazing… Let’s do it!’ There was no hesitation. He said he would help and mentor me along the way. That’s how it began, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

Maunder showed up with Howells in tow, and the team set to work on planning and producing the documentary, which debuted in April 2024. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was learning the craft of film in real time. It was a big learning curve and a labour of love for me,” said Joe.

Being able to collaborate with and learn from Maunder and Howells was a “true gift,” Joe said. “Their dedication to and loyalty for their craft goes above and beyond. They have a real skill for dealing with people, always showing patience and good humour. They make art fun. It’s being able to craft an idea, communicate what you are seeing to the other person, and turning that into a masterpiece. All while having a laugh and joking with each other.”

The Forgotten Warriors is the first production for Joe, but he says definitely not the last. “I didn’t anticipate going into film but, you know, I caught the bug. I’m in the process now of starting my own production company.”

Interestingly, the Maunder and Howells partnership is still an informal one. They have never incorporated as a single entity and have no plans to do so.

“We don’t work together on everything,” Maunder said. “It’s good to have that flexibility. But it’s nice when we do because the sum is always greater than the parts.”

“Why ruin a good thing?” Howells added. “I’d only just drive Roger around the bend anyway.”