Getting The Shot - Behind the Scenes | Life Below Zero
[Music] Working, that's getting super frustrating. This is what it's like on Life Below Zero: down tough conditions all around, a filament, no heat, no power, do anything, won't even turn on, and falling too many times we have balance. It's just a typical day of the Arctic.
They confessed what we got: the challenging environment that we deal with up here in Alaska for getting the cool shots that you see on Life Below Zero. And we're in the middle of nowhere, and I am gonna be getting some wood. I have a grandbaby coming in, and I wanted to try to keep my grandson nice, comfortable, and warm. It is just had a baby, so she's bringing him to meet the rest of the crew.
A pretty good spot to launch our drone, which is one of my personal favorite things to do on the show. And flying the drone is super fun. I love doing it, but it comes with a bunch of different challenges that are hard to overcome, especially when it's cold. Most of them are related to the cold.
The monitor that I use is an iPad, and I use this heating blanket with a battery to keep the iPad warm. And then when I'm shooting a drone, because it's cold and my hands are pretty stationary and I can't take them off in the throw to shove them in my pocket, I use these fingerless gloves. You need to have fingertip dexterity in order to do the controls, especially to touch the monitor because it's a touchscreen monitor. I certainly can't be taking on or off gloves, and I also can't have my hands freeze.
Here are my batteries, which each have a hand warmer attached to them to keep them warm. I put my monitor in its monitor frame. I'm trying to do all this stuff as quickly as I can so that stuff doesn't start freezing literally while I'm putting it together. I bring, believe it or not, it's a regular standard bath mat that you probably use in your own bathroom. It's got a fuzzy side, and it's got a rubberized side that usually goes down on the floor. Well, this rubberized side can take off and land on it with no problems.
About half the time, we get to this point and the drone just decides it doesn't want to fly in zero-degree temperatures, which is what it is today. So hopefully it flies, and we'll get some good shots. [Music]
If something does go wrong, we're in the middle of nowhere, and we might not be able to get another drone. We can't go down to the corner store, buy another one, or get it fixed. Even if we have other technical difficulties, we just got to figure it out on the fly.
[Music] So the drone itself is a really amazing and unique device for us to get really cool footage for the show, especially because the terrain in Alaska is so amazing and vast. It really is useful to show the place of a team human in this giant background. Alaska is amazing, and it doesn't get any less amazing from, you know, 300 feet in the air.
Snow tomorrow, so I'm not sure we're gonna make it into camp. We're gonna give it a hell of a try, but we're ready for anything. We're going into Quebec for the first time, and Stu's been away for a couple of months, so it's sort of a big deal. We have to figure out one and always first, the safety of the mission.
So we're flying in with a ski plane, and we want to document our arrival and our departure. So tonight, everybody's putting cameras up and figuring out where to put the camera, trying to rig up this plane and put these GoPros on it. Trying to figure out, trying to rig up a GoPro, trying to find a new spot for it here inside the plane so that when Sue is traveling, we can get some good shots of her and good shots of what she's flying.
We have to put these little cameras, these GoPros, in weird places we can't only see what's on them, so we have to connect to it phone to figure out just what we're shooting. All this takes longer than we think to get the right angle, to get the proper little clamp that the machinist is making. It's good we came tonight; we've got it sort of. [Music]