Woke up feeling very hungover again. Despite not drinking a drop of booze. Still, not sleeping well. Keep having to pee because I’m drinking so much, but wake up dehydrated with a sore throat anyway. Spend the whole time playing catch up with my body! Usually by mid morning, I’m rehydrated
Spent hours sorting through our mountain of camera kit, and preparing for this afternoon and the start of our filming proper.
Although what we are filming would, in England, be fairly easy, in these conditions even the most mundane task becomes a chore. With mitts on you can’t get the tape out of it’s plastic wrap, let alone put a tape in the camera. Even unzipping the camera bag is hard. I tried taking my glove off yesterday while filming the ice roads and within seconds my hand was really painful and throbbing. Even keeping my gloves on and filming for a period made my thumbs ache badly. You have to keep moving and wiggling fingers around. The temperature yesterday was about – 20 fahrenheit with - 30 wind chill. Making an ambient temperature of about - 50 fahrenheit. (which I think is – 40 celsius!!!!!!!!!) Any way, it was bloody cold.
It’s a funny thing actually, you never get bored of saying how cold it is. Every time we’re outside Sam and I both repeatedly tell each other how cold it is, and how cold we are. Even with the best kit on. (Yesterday evening we got too hot in our kit.) But if it’s cold its impossible to resist saying it. Maybe that’ll pass after a few weeks.
The kit though, is getting a bit embarrassing. All the seasoned hands up here, wander around in work overalls, maybe a thickish jacket a pair of gloves, but definitely barefaced. Sam and I, however, look like we’re about to attempt Everest - full face masks, double gloves, massive duvet jackets and sallopets, - 100 degree rubber insulated boots – and to make matters worse everything we bought is black – so we look kind of like demented ice ninjas. Or worse inexperienced film crew with way too much money. Either way it’s not a good look – but it is a warm one.
One lesson we learnt yesterday was that you need to be totally prepared before you go out, if you get outside without full face mask, gloves, hat etc already on – you freeze in the brief time your trying to get them on and have retreat back inside. And doing anything with kitoutsde is very hard. So we spent this morning readying our kit. Batteries have too be kept close to your body otherwise they last minutes (AAs particularly) which means using long leads. You also need to be ready for the temperature differential, hot inside cold out. There’s no in between where you can change – so you have to be able to peel off / put on layers without too much trouble. And this differential is even worse for the cameras – take one inside after getting it freezing cold outside and it’ll be soaked in condensation in seconds, take it outside after keeping it warm inside and it’ll be covered in frozen condensation just as fast. Not good….
At 2.30pm we’re heading over to 2P to film our rolligon convoy being loaded up with the Kuukpik rig. 5 Rolligons’ll be heading out to the absolute wilderness of the interior 100 miles from the nearest town. The journey takes 12 hours at 6 miles an hour and is apparently extremely rough – being entirely cross country. The rolligons are a bit like the snow cats they use to piste the alps except much larger, about the size of a large articulated juggernaut with flat bed backs for transporting. They have about 24 double tyres with a PSI of about 25 per tyre (compared to car tyres at about 160!) kind of like a very flat football – this means that the weight is spread and they won’t leave tracks or damage the tundra. (its strange how environmental they are up here considering how the oil they’re preparing is fucking up the world – not that I’d dare mention that out loud up here, for fear of losing my job. Still, I can’t talk with my petrol guzzling merc. But it is ironic that the global warming - that oil use is causing - is making the winter season – the only time they can do exploratory drilling as far out as our destination - even shorter.)
Bit nervous about the journey, as well as about meeting the crew we’ll be on the remote rig with (some of whom are catching a lift too). The quality of the film very much depends on the quality of our relationship with these guys. Same with the rolligon drivers in miniature (if they won’t cooperate, chat with us and stop to let us film them driving from different angles and stop to pick us up again, it will be very hard to make a decent sequence out of this journey. In fact if they forget to pick us up again in the wilderness we’d probably die.)
Am also, however, very excited to be finally nearing our destination after almost 7 days of travelling and god knows how many hours of courses, planning and - worse – horrific corporate videos.
Fingers crossed.
Spent hours sorting through our mountain of camera kit, and preparing for this afternoon and the start of our filming proper.
Although what we are filming would, in England, be fairly easy, in these conditions even the most mundane task becomes a chore. With mitts on you can’t get the tape out of it’s plastic wrap, let alone put a tape in the camera. Even unzipping the camera bag is hard. I tried taking my glove off yesterday while filming the ice roads and within seconds my hand was really painful and throbbing. Even keeping my gloves on and filming for a period made my thumbs ache badly. You have to keep moving and wiggling fingers around. The temperature yesterday was about – 20 fahrenheit with - 30 wind chill. Making an ambient temperature of about - 50 fahrenheit. (which I think is – 40 celsius!!!!!!!!!) Any way, it was bloody cold.
It’s a funny thing actually, you never get bored of saying how cold it is. Every time we’re outside Sam and I both repeatedly tell each other how cold it is, and how cold we are. Even with the best kit on. (Yesterday evening we got too hot in our kit.) But if it’s cold its impossible to resist saying it. Maybe that’ll pass after a few weeks.
The kit though, is getting a bit embarrassing. All the seasoned hands up here, wander around in work overalls, maybe a thickish jacket a pair of gloves, but definitely barefaced. Sam and I, however, look like we’re about to attempt Everest - full face masks, double gloves, massive duvet jackets and sallopets, - 100 degree rubber insulated boots – and to make matters worse everything we bought is black – so we look kind of like demented ice ninjas. Or worse inexperienced film crew with way too much money. Either way it’s not a good look – but it is a warm one.
One lesson we learnt yesterday was that you need to be totally prepared before you go out, if you get outside without full face mask, gloves, hat etc already on – you freeze in the brief time your trying to get them on and have retreat back inside. And doing anything with kitoutsde is very hard. So we spent this morning readying our kit. Batteries have too be kept close to your body otherwise they last minutes (AAs particularly) which means using long leads. You also need to be ready for the temperature differential, hot inside cold out. There’s no in between where you can change – so you have to be able to peel off / put on layers without too much trouble. And this differential is even worse for the cameras – take one inside after getting it freezing cold outside and it’ll be soaked in condensation in seconds, take it outside after keeping it warm inside and it’ll be covered in frozen condensation just as fast. Not good….
At 2.30pm we’re heading over to 2P to film our rolligon convoy being loaded up with the Kuukpik rig. 5 Rolligons’ll be heading out to the absolute wilderness of the interior 100 miles from the nearest town. The journey takes 12 hours at 6 miles an hour and is apparently extremely rough – being entirely cross country. The rolligons are a bit like the snow cats they use to piste the alps except much larger, about the size of a large articulated juggernaut with flat bed backs for transporting. They have about 24 double tyres with a PSI of about 25 per tyre (compared to car tyres at about 160!) kind of like a very flat football – this means that the weight is spread and they won’t leave tracks or damage the tundra. (its strange how environmental they are up here considering how the oil they’re preparing is fucking up the world – not that I’d dare mention that out loud up here, for fear of losing my job. Still, I can’t talk with my petrol guzzling merc. But it is ironic that the global warming - that oil use is causing - is making the winter season – the only time they can do exploratory drilling as far out as our destination - even shorter.)
Bit nervous about the journey, as well as about meeting the crew we’ll be on the remote rig with (some of whom are catching a lift too). The quality of the film very much depends on the quality of our relationship with these guys. Same with the rolligon drivers in miniature (if they won’t cooperate, chat with us and stop to let us film them driving from different angles and stop to pick us up again, it will be very hard to make a decent sequence out of this journey. In fact if they forget to pick us up again in the wilderness we’d probably die.)
Am also, however, very excited to be finally nearing our destination after almost 7 days of travelling and god knows how many hours of courses, planning and - worse – horrific corporate videos.
Fingers crossed.
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