News - Spring 2009.

RED in the Arctic

RED One Camera Arctic In the middle of shooting a series for Channel 4, called "Daredevils" on the RED One. The series is basically about people that do really extreme (crazy? stuped?) sports, and why they are driven to push the limits so far. First trip was to Arctic Finland to film Wim Hof, a Dutch guy who goes by the name of "The Ice Man", who was planning to run a marathon in sub-zero tempertures, wearing nothing but shorts and sandals. To acclimatize his body, Wim was also planning a series of "swims", under ice, again in just his shorts, which also had to be filmed.

Luke and Pekko with the RED One on the Steadicam The challenge for me and the Director, Luke Cambell, was to shoot somebody running and make it look "interesting", whilst trying to illustrate the psychology of Wim's "mind over body" attitude to push himself to the limit. We decided to use RED One on a steadicam, with its capabiity of shooting 100fps onto a CF card (120fps onto a hard drive but we used CF cards to keep the weight down). My camera assistant, Pekko Vuorela, doubled as the stedicam opeator and he did a fantastic job shooting some really dramatic running sequences, from a snow-mobile and whilst running alongside Wim: View Quicktime Clip from the rough cut. I am very pleased to announce that the RED performed perfectly in temperatures as low as minus 28ºC!

ice diving

For the Ice Swimming sequences, my trustee assistant, Pekko, was my safety diver. I decided o shoot this with my Sony V1 HDV camera and housing, as the RED housing is just too big for this kind of job. Ice diving is a challenge at best of times, and with the air temperature at minus 8ºC, we were having to use a blow-torch to remove our regulators when changing tanks!

Win Hof Ice Man However, we were not complaining: we were in very cosy Otter Drysuits but Wim was in just a pair of shorts!

Wim succeeded in running his marathon in 5.5 hours and then proceeded to down some ice cold beers whilst smoking a cigarette! Nutter... but a real nice guy. Next week Italy, to shoot a chap throwing himself out of a helicopter! Never a dull moment!!!

Click any image to enlarge.