James Frystak is an Emmy Award winning Canadian wildlife cinematographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. For eight years he has filmed natural history for Netflix, BBC, National Geographic, NBC, Sky and CBC, including the Netflix series Island of the Sea Wolves, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography.
Much of James's work happens on the coast of British Columbia, where years of patient fieldwork have given him rare access to coastal sea wolves and coyotes. He also films black bears fishing the salmon runs, along with the wider rainforest and marine wildlife of the Pacific Northwest, and has worked further north in the Canadian Arctic.
He works across long lens, slow motion, aerial, gyro-stabilized and remote camera systems. He currently shoots on a RED Komodo-X and a DJI Mavic 3 Cine, and holds Canadian and US (FAA) drone licences with more than 500 hours of flight time. He is a member of IATSE Local 891.
James is the co-founder and CEO of DenSyte, a wildlife footage licensing marketplace that connects professional wildlife cinematographers with productions, broadcasters and NGOs, and pays creators fairly for their archives.
