Producer Yvonne Drebert and Director/Cinematographer Zach Melnick are a husband-and-wife documentary production team, working under the banner of Inspired Planet Productions, located on the Saugeen (Bruce) Peninsula. Over the past 20 years, they’ve co-created more than 40 hours of nature, science, and history documentary.
“These lakes in northern Ontario gave decision makers the tools they needed to create policy to ensure a healthier future for all our lakes and it’s amazing that IISD Experimental Lakes Area continues to fulfill that role to this day.”
Yvonne Drebert
We were thrilled to invite Yvonne and Zach out to the site in August 2022.
In 2014, they began work on the 17×1 hour documentary series, “Striking Balance,” for TVO and the Knowledge Network. The series told many fish stories – from Atlantic salmon in the Bay of Fundy, to the yellow perch of Quebec’s Lac Saint-Pierre, to the gigantic lake trout of Great Bear Lake in the NWT. But the most intriguing story they encountered was unfolding right in their own backyard: in the depths of the Great Lakes trillions of invasive mussels are changing our lakes on a scale unseen since the last ice age.
It’s gone largely unnoticed, but over the past 20 years, some 950 trillion invasive quagga mussels have literally sucked the life out of the Great Lakes. They’re trapping the basic building blocks of life, nutrients, on the lake bottom. Without nutrients, organisms of all kinds – from the tiniest plankton to the largest fish have vanished. In Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Ontario, vast offshore areas have become “biological deserts,” heralding one of the biggest changes to the earth’s freshwaters since the last ice age.
It’s nutrients that brought the team to the IISD Experimental Lakes Area. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, critical research was conducted here that helped us understand how nutrients, like phosphorus, affect lake systems.
You’ll be able to discover the whole story in the team’s upcoming documentary, All Too Clear, due out in early 2024.
Take a look below at just some of the work inspired by their time out at yours truly as part of a larger documentary project.
Yvonne and Zach's Time at the Site
While Yvonne and Zach are busy working away at their larger documentary project, they sent over some footage of their time at the site for us to enjoy (and allow us to reminisce about summer 2022…)
