Filming in a Place of Extremes | Continent 7: Antarctica

Antarctica is a place of extremes. Visibility's dance 20 laces, it's cold. They're always cold, and camera equipment doesn't work. So, on that cold camping, it's probably 100 degrees warmer than it is right now. Because Antarctica is so hard to get to, we send a very small team. So, on any given day, I would be generally alone. It would be, say, negative 20. You'd be sleeping in a tent. You'd have to continue to operate camera equipment. You'd be running sound for several people, and you are hundreds of miles away from the nearest resupply.

Now, we advanced onwards into nothing, just the ice shelf and horizon. Now, so my first trip down there, everyone said, "You're gonna love all the Penguins you're gonna see." Well, I didn't see any animals for the first month because all the animals live by the water. My second time down, I saw lots of animals. My favorite, they were the Penguins because they don't have any predators when they're on land, so they're just curious. They waddle themselves right up to you, and they get just a few feet away, and then they just kind of stare at you for a while.

There are these little fat footballs that just kind of look into your eyes. It's the cutest thing. Very few people go to Antarctica. More people generally go to the Super Bowl than are in Antarctica at any given time. Do we get an incredible window into this part of the world that most people know nothing about? The most interesting thing that I took from Antarctica is really what the series is based on, and that is the people that go to Antarctica.

The people that dedicate their lives, and they'll be away for three, four months, sometimes a year at a time away from their family, sacrificing so much so we can learn about a very cold climate that is changing. It was amazing, incredible, and so insightful and inspiring. But it was also the hardest assignment of my life.