Filming Extreme Weather (Behind the Scenes) | National Geographic

Really nice right here. Tom, number one just went off. She wants to go, something doesn't she? This could get exciting.

A faction—I'm Sean Casey, a documentary filmmaker. We are currently in Skagway, Alaska, and we're about to motor 200 miles to the middle of the Alaskan wilderness to get the opening shot to my new large format film, Extreme Weather.

Now, you can't plan for that—that's the bottom line. You can't plan for how wet it's going to be, where your campsite is going to be, what the situation is going to be. You bring everything you think you're going to need, but there's always going to be stuff that happens that you can't control. It's about how you deal with situations like that, how you rebuild, and how you forge on.

It's all about adaptation when you're doing this kind of filmmaking, and this isn't filmmaking where you've got, you know, a food truck, we've got support, where you can call for anything you need. This is kind of remote adventure filmmaking, and whatever you bring is what you have.

This is how it's always been up here—just raw, beautiful. But in that rawness, things can happen quickly. Weather conditions are constantly changing. There's a multitude of things that can go wrong, but you have to push through these things because this project is important—about our weather and how it's changing, becoming more extreme.

We filmed massive dust storms and the droughts in the western United States, tornadoes in the Midwest, wildfires of California, and the heroics of firefighters trying to control them. It's all about powerful images for this format. So if we could get a glacier calving directly at us, that would be incredible.

It's going to go! Only issue is, it's that area that's going to count. There's another down—that's going, it's going to go before we get there. It's going—there it goes! I want to be as close as we can, but there is a very real danger of being hit. It could be car-sized chunks of ice flying hundreds of feet from the glacier.

It's thrilling! It is nervous—it's one to ten on the glacier, so we can reference or someone see something happening right now. Seven right there! Chunks of ice are falling off on each side—could be offensive. Oh my god!