Two Otago fishing mates have become overnight winners with their fly fishing film Once in a Blue Moon, about the fly fishing adventure of a life time.
Carl McNeil and Earl Kingi won a top American Film Award as they unravel a Fiordland mystery of trout eating mice... and then trying to catch the big one.
It took three years to film and over 400 hours of never before seen footage.
It's so popular they've had over 70,000 hits on YouTube
Fiorldand is country we are all proud of… and yet rarely get to see first hand. It's remote, beautiful and simply stunning
And it's down here at the bottom of the country where professional fly fisherman McNeil lives and breaths fly fishing, dreaming of catching the big one.
"Been for almost 30 years since I was 5 -6 years old," says McNeil.
"Like most Kiwi kids, most Kiwi country kids, my dad took me out fishing as a wee kid and yeah it has become a big part of my life."
Carl is a self admitting trout bum - a certified master casting instructor and obsessed with fly fishing.
"The thing that I enjoy most about angling and fly fishing is the places we go," says McNeil.
"We live in a beautiful country and it is a great excuse to get out and go and see it and do it."
And it's here in Fiordland in some of the most inaccessible places where some of the biggest trout live.
You have to have the best skills and experience if you are to bag fish like this.
The idea for a movie came after years spent fishing with his mate Earl Kingi, a cameraman and a keen angler.
"The idea for Once in a Blue Moon - I spent years and years with my mate Earl and we sat by a river and seeing all the glorious stuff every day and we thought we should probably make a film on this," says McNeil.
"And we said this every fishing trip for about 10 or 15 years and we had seen a lot of fishing films and really felt that they had never done fly fishing any justice.
"So finally we got our A into G and it took three years to make and that was the motivation. We really just made it for Earl and I, and low and behold a lot of other people have liked it which is really cool."
"Every night we would sitting outside in stunning conditions and Carl said: 'You should really film this one day, you're a cameraman why don't you film it?'," says Kingi.
What Kingi and McNeil set out to do was unravel an event that occurs once a decade, when mice grow in their thousands and trout feed on the rodents.
"Our film Once in a Blue Moon is about an interesting phonenoem that occurs in our native forest once every 5-10 years," says McNeil.
"The native forest flowers it produce seed and the rats and mice eat them and the population booms. It's fantastic for the trout.
"Once they have eaten the forest floor then they start to swim and they end up in our lakes and rivers. A trout it is used to eating bugs - now it is eating mice which is like eating 10 cheese burgers a day so these trout get very, very big very quickly and they turn into aggressive feeders and for a fly angler it is an absolute dream."
In the film Carl meticulously crafts a fly in the shape of a mouse and then goes for the big one.
The Kiwi fly fishing film has turned into a huge hit in the US winning a top award with the underwater footage alone being called some of the best ever seen.
"We tried to make the film really different and try to get stuff that people had never seen before and a large part of that was trout underwater," says McNeil.
"We got Dave Allen, put him in a wetsuit and threw him in the river for a week," says Kingi. "He nearly got hypothermia and he got some stunning stuff that we have never seen before."
"Took about three years to make the film,so it did take a long time I suppose," says McNeil. "We have taken 300 - 400 hours of footage that is edited down to 30 minutes."
Now these footage is playing on a 40 city film tour through the United States,
showcasing the best of New Zealand.
All thanks to a couple of guys who love their country and their fishing.