How does one get that golden ticket to Fiji? As the old adage goes, it’s all about who you know. In the show’s early days, Kirhoffer says they’d fly to location and put up flyers in youth hostels. Between that and word of mouth, they were able to fill the necessary slots. And then the internet happened. After Probst discussed the Dream Team in a behind-the-scenes video that circulated, the secret was out. Nowadays, it’s still about knowing the right person, but candidates must also submit a 1-2-minute video along with a resume. Just like casting the show’s players, they want to hear your story.
“Now, Milhouse and I go through a couple hundred of them to get a dozen new Dream Teamers,” says Kirhoffer. “We don’t advertise, they just come in. Matt, Hudson, and I talk to our old schools about ‘Survivor,’ and so we get interested young people. It’s still a word-of-mouth kind of thing and it’s just getting more and more popular.”
Former Dream Teamer Zach Sundelius (who’s now a Supervising Producer on the show) was one of those young people who saw Probst’s video around the time of “Survivor: China” in 2007. Living in Wisconsin, Sundelius had zero connections in Los Angeles. But once he learned about the Dream Team, he thought to himself, “I gotta do that. I gotta make it happen.”
Blindly sending resumes didn’t get him anywhere, but social media did. He created a Twitter account named “Future Dream Team,” and that was the first step toward changing his life forever. “[I] was chatting with random people on there and ended up talking to someone, [journalist] Gordon Holmes, who covered ‘Survivor,'” Sundelius recalls. “He said, ‘I can’t guarantee anything, but I can send your resume along to the people I know there.’ Then about a month later, they called me and then I was in Samoa for the Dream Team a month later.”
Sundelius remembers “geeking out” for the first month he was on location, saying he was “over the moon” to be a part of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of a show he’d loved watching for years. “It was physically demanding, but every experience felt so huge,” he remembers. “I always tell people that whatever I go on to do, the Dream Team was always my favorite job. That was always the coolest job I’m ever gonna have in my life. I peaked at age 24.”
As a journalism major in college, Sundelius was almost immediately drawn to the storytelling aspect of the show. Naturally, he gravitated toward the producing side of things. Nowadays, he lives in Fiji during pre-production and production, but segues over to post-production work once the cameras stop rolling.
“Leading up to pre-production, there’s lots of creative meetings about what the challenges are going to be, and what all the twists and turns of the season are going to be,” he says. “It seems like we’re always almost doing two seasons at once because even as we’re gearing up to come out here for one, we’re still in post finishing the editing for the previous one, so your brain is shifting a lot. Then once I’m out here, it’s working with the director, producers, all the camera operators, and everyone else to ensure that the challenges go smoothly, that we’re capturing great stuff. When I get to post, I oversee a team of four or five challenge editors and then we piece it all together.”
Sundelius also works with POV camera operators (who set up GoPros throughout the course), and the drone team, who’s responsible for the show’s gorgeous aerial shots. “We spend a ton of time figuring out what those shots are going to be and capturing all the big aerial stuff that makes the show feel big and epic and cool.”
I can’t help but inquire about the pain points once again. Sundelius points to the nonstop physical toll it takes to make the show — especially when the crew must brace for back-to-back seasons. But despite long days where they’re getting pounded by rain or struggling on a turbulent boat ride where you’re “just getting sloshed around,” he still says it’s “so fun” to work on “Survivor.”
“The adventure is what makes it sweet,” he says. “That’s the magic. Sometimes the rough moments are when it feels the best and that’s what bonds the family together the closest. When you’ve been through some real stuff together.”
