A Rugged Film Location - Behind the Scenes | Life Below Zero

We are here to document the lives of people living in Alaska. The harsh reality is the environment we're up against; it makes it tough to do our job. Their working on Life Below Zero can be very dangerous—guns here, cameras here. You never know what to expect. You see that? Gonna be tough, but we're gonna get the shot. Every scenario, we got to prepare for this. But we're still smiling, we're having fun, still making Life Below Zero. Yeah, bring it on!

So, of all the things that we do working on Life Below Zero, I would say this is one of the most challenging. It's our travel day to the Hailstones' Koala camp. The biggest challenge is getting out there; we can only get to about a hundred miles away from where we're going by plane. Then, the rest of the way, we need to go on snow machines, hauling sleds with some of our gear. We are right at the edge of the peninsula, so we'll be traveling over sea ice for the next forty miles. The ice is very dynamic out here on the ocean; it's breaking and coming together. It can be moved by the tides and by the wind, and it's a little bit dangerous. But we've mitigated those dangers by making a good plan, taking our time, and being thoughtful about how we travel. So, we're right on target. We've got a couple of hours of daylight left, and it looks like we should be fine to get into camp and make some shelter before it's totally dark.

It's incredible that we get to do this. So, this is our job—riding across the Arctic Ocean. We're really feeling lucky right now. We arrived here just before dark last night after our 100-mile trip. So, when we got in last night, it was all we could do to just get shelter up basically and get the things that we needed to get a decent night's sleep. We've got a home that's relatively comfortable, relatively warm. Now, it's time to organize and settle in so that we can be ready for filming.

Anyone that works on this show—you can't be complacent. You need to prepare properly every time you go in. Something bad could happen; you don’t want to be out there in a sticky situation. Here we are in Deadhorse, inside the hangar. We're going into Kavik—hasn't been that Kavik for quite a bit of time. So, we're gonna go in planning for the worst, hoping for the best. When we get there, we have quite a bit of camera equipment here. A show like Life Below Zero requires us to travel with a lot of gear. This isn't your standard show where you can drive in a car, get to set, and start shooting. We're going in not knowing what we're gonna get into, so we go as prepared as possible.

We're heading in, and we're actually hitting them with Sue. This is her first time going back in months; we don't know what to expect at camp. So, we've got full GoPros rigged. My focus, as always, I'm trying to capture what we expect to see. And that is going to be—we're going to be flying over the camp to check it out. So, we've got a camera looking down, a camera on the wing looking at her as she's driving, and then obviously her as she's looking out the window. We can't get in there, so it's just gonna be GoPros. We just enjoy the ride. Our number one concern is safety; everything is safe and everyone is safe doing our work.

Personal gear's over here, guys. So, we're going out to Andy's Bass at this place. I'm really excited to go out there; there's a lot of logistics involved with getting to Candis. We start in Fairbanks, we fly to Eagle on a small plane, and then they basically—we put all of our stuff here, and then we get on an even smaller plane. Then, we just do multiple trips for about five or six hours until everything's out there. Let me get on snow machines and sleds, and we basically haul everything to our cabins to get set up. But the main thing here is that when you're filming people living off the grid, we have to live off the grid too. In order to really capture that story, we have to live that life.

So, right here we basically have all of our food items, our camera gear, fuel here for cooking. We're in a very remote place; we kind of have to be self-sustainable from the beginning. Oh man, tiny, smaller than the outhouse I'm going to be using. [Music] It's a very windy area; there's a lot of mountain terrain, there's low trees. And then, he basically has to make a perfect landing on this lake, and it's just complete glare, right? So, it's a really bumpy landing, but we're here and the real work begins.

The way we get the true story— we're not living in a hotel. I mean, we are literally in a remote place, and in order to capture that true story, we have to live that lifestyle. Time to go live off the grid for a little bit. [Music]