About

In a 38-year long career as a TV broadcast professional, Andrew spent his early years editing TV commercials, and won prestigious international awards including Cannes and New York TV Gold. Clients included SAB, Nedbank, Toyota, United Bank, General Tyres, Firestone, Canon, Minolta, FNB, Ford, Rocoh, Peter Stuyvesant for agencies such as Hunt Lascaris, J Walter Thompson and many more.

He is now a highly-acclaimed adventure-travel filmmaker and has produced and presented some of the world’s best loved overland travel films. They are especially sought after by 4WD and motorcycle enthusiasts because his programs mix the wonders of overland exploration with the grit of men, women and machines. His works includes nine13-part series for TV, a host of 4×4 training programs and a batch of aviation documentaries broadcast by major networks including Discovery Wings.

His main YouTube Channel 4xOVERLAND has over 290K subscribers and 71M views and receives an average of 700K – 1 million views every month. 

About Andrew

I’m half 4WD enthusiast, half filmmaker. Both of these pursuits germinated when I was very young, and developed alongside each other during my professional career.

I bought my first 4×4 at 22 and won my first international film editing award at 24. At 29 I bought my second 4×4. Around this time I gave up full-time editing and went into publishing my own 4WD books and maps. Somewhere in between, I learned how to fly. Gliders became a second obsession. When I was about 50 I returned to full-time filmmaking, producing 9 series of an adventure travel show for South African TV that have since been broadcast in six countries. 

I started teaching filmmaking in 2015 while living in the UK and launched Beafilmaker.com that has so far inspired over 26 000 students in 130 counties. All my courses err on the creative rather than the technical, because there is so little creative teaching available on-line.

During all this, I’ve owned another 17 4x4s and have driven on five continents in 19 countries. I’ve fallen in love with Land Cruisers, Mercedes-Gs, Land Rovers and even a few other vehicles that I’ve been loaned.

So now I’m supposed to be nearing retirement age. I can’t see that happening anytime soon because I love what I do far too much. I echo the words of Noel Coward: “Work is more fun than fun.”

To sum up, my passions include aircraft and glider flying, making documentary films, family time and travel—especially into the wilderness in my 4×4. That obsession has been with me since my father took me to the Okavango in 1972. It was here that I sat in my first 4×4: A Series-3 LWB Land Rover.

The first 4×4 motion I ever experienced was the Land Rover being backed hurriedly into a tree to avoid an elephant. The tail light broke. My second ride was in a Series-2, SWB open-top Land Rover at Xaxaba Camp on Chief’s Island in the Okavango. It was here that I went off-road for the first time: I remember fabled Lloyd Wilmot using the Rover to chase a hyena across a runway he was building. The vehicle hit an anthill and shot me high into the air. I landed inside the spare wheel lying in the back of the truck. From that moment, I was hooked!

In the 90’s I spent the first year of the decade living in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. It was there that I wrote my first book on a subject that at the time was no more than a hobby. It was called ‘The Complete Guide to Four-Wheel Drive’. With the immediate success of the book (which sold uninterrupted in South Africa for 24 years), a second followed. It led to the creation of 4xOverland.com, a publisher of books, DVDs, videos and maps aimed at the worldwide 4×4 community.8   71