Alaskan Timelapse - Behind the Scenes | Life Below Zero

Campers aren't working; that's getting super frustrating. This is what it's like on life below zero. Cameras are already down, tough conditions all around— a fill-in: no heat, no power, no anything. Oh, won't even turn it on. Too many times we have bad winds; it's just a typical day in the Arctic.

We invest what we got; it's really cold, but this is kind of our job. This is what we do—this is what we live for. How can we do that? Out-of-the-box cinematography. The Iditarod isn't something I've been dreaming about doing for 12 years, and it's the last great race. This is the Grand Olympics of the North.

The first thing I'm gonna have to do is get out my maps and get out my mileages and start making a race plan. More people have summited Everest than have finished Iditarod. Jessie is just planning out Iditarod—all the stuff he has to take for the Iditarod race.

It'd be really cool to get a cool specialty shot time-lapse, but we're trying to figure out how to do it. Benji had a good idea; he's like, "What if we did this corkscrew bird's-eye view over his shoulder, making this kind of pop?" We're just gonna make do with what we got and start building and see if it'll work.

This part that sucks because it's cold; my hands are gonna get cold. Man, that burns! I know one of the things that we really strive for on the show, outside of a great story, is to try to do these incredibly creative shots that are out of the box—usually utilizing stuff that's not meant to be used that sort of way.

So every trip, every show, every episode that we produce, we do that out-of-the-box cinematography. This is all we got to work with; it's not like you just go get any old bolt and size you need at the hardware store. You know?

"Oh, perfect! All right, let's go take it up there and see if we can hang it." All right, so far, so good. The idea of the shot is to pull out from the map so you can see him writing and then pull out and twist. It'll see it, but we're gonna try to keep the map in focus the entire time as we pull out.

The lens is cold, so what we have to do every time we bring any of our gear—cameras or lenses—from inside to outside is we have to let it acclimate.

So it gets foggy out here, and then it gets foggy on the inside. We can't shoot until this lens acclimates to the temperature inside. The idea is to really show that essence of time passage for all the work that he has to do. We want to do the most incredible shot that we can try to pull off to make that look amazing.

Half the battle in these time-lapses is the ingenuity and being innovative and creative. Running the loader is what I noticed; this is oil that's being blown up. This is the piece of machinery that's going to get my runway fixed. This has got to get fixed; once it does, I'm back in business.

But until it is, I'm out of business. We're going to try to capture the whole time-lapse all the way across the Kavik—with dusk all the way until the night to the Northern Lights. We need a lot of weight because we're going to put a lot of tension on the cords.

So we're gonna ratchet strap one point in, ratchet as hard as we can down, and then we're gonna run the line all the way across. Pretension the better because we don't want the camera to sag; we want it to be taught. There we go; as you can see, one point is secure—it's not going one way or the other.

We're gonna put a lot of tension on this, so we need to make sure it's pretty stable. So here's our beginning of the shot; we'll be here. We're trying to achieve a full Kavik run from her storage shed, generator shack, loader—all the way to the front of the Twinkie.

So from 80 paces, roughly 80 feet, we'll be able to go the length of her camp all the way to the front. So we're probably about 60% done with the tension, and as we're pulling the tension, the barrels are moving.

So now we have to figure out more weight for the barrels, so when we put more tension on—100% tension—we will be solid and the barrels won't move. The ropes are perfectly even, the carriage will ride straight, and it won't bounce off the wires or the rope.

So we're pretty much at that point where we can mount the 5D. The temperatures aren't in the negatives yet, but a motor for the slingshot time-lapse is all metal. I need to just basically insulate it, and an easy way to do it is just to use an extra, and that at least insulates it enough that it stays warm.

"Houston Texans save the day!" So we just set it; the camera is now rolling and the best thing we can do is get the hell out of the way and let the camera do its work.

[Music]