Snorricam

This is our weird little camera mount in action at last.

Greenland fashion statement

Here we are preparing to record a performance by Nive Nielsen in buggy buggy Greenland. The mosquito netting is a very stylish look, I think, but we decided after much deliberation to remove it for the take. However, having done that, we then had to halt things a few times when insects flew into her ear or her eye. She did complete one entire take with a mosquito that had crawled up her sleeve munching happily on her arm. I am hoping that take will have a certain pained intensity that will make it stand out. However I suppose it's actually more probable that it will suck. Get it? Mosquito? Suck? Never mind.

Exotic Greenland

Here's something I would never see at home: a nice bicycle, unlocked.

Flight to Nuuk

5:30 am call for an early flight, in a harsh and unforgiving land where the coffee shops don't open until 11.

Captain Dave

This is the captain of our chase boat, as we call it, the boat from which we will be shooting the Dax dodging icebergs. It is also known as a follow boat. In Danish, foljebot. Hey, I almost speak Danish!
His name is David, which inspires confidence, don't you think?
It is very interesting for me to meet these Greenlandic people, having now spent some time in the Canadian arctic. To me, they seem exactly like the Canadian Inuit. The same accent, the same mannerisms, the same sense of humour.
"We are going to have to go back now," he says very seriously, "we have run out of coffee."
We Daves understand and respect each other in ways non-Daves can never fully understand.
I'm sure that to each other, the Greenlanders and the Inuit seem quite different, I'd love to learn enough to start noticing the differences myself. They were made up of populations that had actually lost contact, and were unaware of each other's existence for a long time. The person credited with discovering that they in fact shared the same language, the same culture, and the same genes, was an early explorer named Knud Rasmussen, who although clearly not a Dave, was nevertheless a righteous dude. He was born in Ilulissat, and his birth house is now a museum. We go up there to shoot a scene, arriving at the agreed-upon time, and discover that the woman who was supposed to meet us had showed up and waited for us a day early. The two people working there haven't been told anything about us, don't speak English, don't particularly care, and make if clear that they think the best plan would be for us to go away now. I try to communicate with them by inserting Js into my sentences here and there, but it doesn't work. I guess I don't almost speak Danish after all. However Swedish and Danish are closely related, and Martin, the captain of the Dax, steps in to help and manages to negotiate a plan.
I am now considering extending to Martins some of the respect I had previously reserved for Daves. Of course I shall first have to investigate more fully his feelings about coffee. 

Greenland sled dogs

Greenland dogs are bred to be sled dogs. So bred, in fact, that they won't allow any other dogs onto the island anywhere north of the arctic circle, so the breed will remain pure. There are dogs tethered all over Ilulissat, they're not working at the moment because it is summer, they just hang out, and occasionally, at feeding time, whimper and howl in unison.
There are several at the hotel. The adults are tethered, but the puppies roam about freely. There are signs asking people not to pet, feed, or interact with the dogs, because they are working dogs not pets. However I see several guests ignoring the signs, so I think the morals of these hotel dogs have been a bit tainted. However I observe the rules meticulously myself and walk past ignoring them dismissively. But they don't ignore me, several of them have taken to escorting me protectively down the path to my hotel room, stopping occasionally to look back and make sure I haven't gotten lost yet.
There is something about being escorted to my room by a group of young female dogs that incites me to indulge in an extended but inappropriate piece of wordplay, but I shall resist the temptation. Instead, please make up your own jokes, and enjoy this highly SFW photograph of a cute puppy.

Ice mountain

This is Richard Tegner one of the crew of the sailing ship we are following, being interviewed in front of a very large iceberg; that mountain in the background is actually floating very slowly out to sea, where it will slosh around among others of its kind, occasionally rolling over without warning,or breaking apart and dropping slabs the size of apartment buildings into the ocean, creating unexpected tidal waves that take six minutes to pass. In the fiord we could see the slow rise and fall of the water by about a metre, the leftover ripple from some massive collapse somewhere a long time ago and far far away.
Richard and his two compadres sailed through a posse of these bad boys on their way into town. Muy macho, as they say in Swedish.

The view from my window part 3

I am staying in Illulisat, the iceberg capital of the world. Two of us are staying in igloos. I stayed in an igloo once before, it was kind of cold and I got no sleep at all because I was sleeping between a cameraman and a soundman who both snored. This time it isn't a real igloo, it seems to be made of stainless steel, and instead of being kind of cold it is hot inside like a convection oven.
However there are no snoring technicians sharing it with me, and the view is amazing. I am looking out at the icebergs fresh off the glacier as they head out to look for ocean liners to sink.
Tomorrow our mission is to film the Dax making its way between these icebergs. And successfully failing to ram any, we hope.

The view from my window part 2

I was trying to take an interesting photo of the fields of icebergs we were flying over as we reached Greenland. Instead what I got was an interesting photo of how the high speed rotation of the propellor blades interacts with the scan of the camera built into my tablet.
Interesting to me anyway. Perhaps not to most people. Sorry, it's a long flight.

John Tran, relaxing again

This is John, the cameraman, taking his mind off work on the plane by reading a magazine about black and white photography. So relaxing! Only two colours!

Tortured artist

I'm heading off to Greenland tonight to continue my frigid adventures. The real star of this trip is icebergs, at least we hope so. but I'm also filming a performance with a Greenlandic singer named Nive Nielsen.
http://nivenielsen.com/ 
Since what I really like, esthetically. is to make things unnecessarily complicated, I have decided to subject her to an instrument of torture called a Snorricam. Named after its Icelandic inventor, Mr. Cam, I believe his name is. Or something like that, I forget.

Here is an image of this nefarious device, it's sort of a combination of a corset and the rack. The idea is that the camera is mounted on the performer, so their face remains still while the background moves around them.
Meanwhile my cameraman can enjoy a well-deserved rest. Or go off and film some icebergs.

Timelapse camping

We got two young local fellows to camp out and watch over a timelapse camera for us. It's a motorized timelapse camera, my idea was to get it to pan in a circle over a 24 hour period, following the 24 hour sun around the horizon. Kind of an ambitious idea, it didn't completely work out, it depended on technology we hadn't thoroughly tested and the weather all cooperating at once.
However, not knowing what the future would bring, we plunged ahead, and got the guy who runs the youth centre in Pond Inlet to recommend a couple of responsible young fellows to babysit it. It turned out to be a very complicated project, the whole town shut down that evening for a funeral, which meant that the store where we needed to buy them supplies was closed. Also the outfitter we had rented some stuff from was leaving town for his own camping trip, and we had forgotten to acquire a camp stove for them. Never mind, many errands later we had them all equipped, and left them behind, sitting in a tent out in the middle of nowhere listening to a camera make a clicking noise every two minutes.
When we came to pick them up I asked how camping was. Jesse, the sixteen-year old, said "great!" with a big grin. Jamesie, the eighteen-year old, said "Okay," with a very neutral expression. So, mixed reviews. I figure Jesse got to hang out with one of the cool kids, while Jamesie was stuck with a sixteen-year old. Hopefully Jamesie will now say hi to Jesse in the lunchroom, giving him some new awesome cred amongst his peers, and we will have spread a little joy to at least one deserving young lad.

The Gizmonator

This is our engineer Scott Burton brandishing a strange device. As he so often does, since his job is to operate gizmos of all description.
This one is a mount that holds an array of Gopro cameras pointing in all directions, so that the images they record can be stitched together later to form a complete sphere of video. That's mostly for the web, where people will be able to choose their point of view as they watch. Since what I am primarily working on is what is rather patronizingly known as "flat video," I'm not so inclined to let people choose their own point of view. People's point of view should be chosen for them by qualified professionals, in my opinion. That's right, people like me.
So those of you who have inconveniently independent ideas about such things can just stay on the web, amongst others of your ilk, you will not be missed in my world. The rest of you can summarize your multifarious and complex preferences by occasionally operating your remote control. Between button pushes, we will supply you with comforting and distracting imagery, that as time goes on, will start to look more and more similar on every channel.
There is some kind of metaphor for something taking shape here, but I can't for the life of me figure out what. Never mind, I can't think about that right now, Big Brother is coming on soon.

    photo by Ulla Lohmann

Who is Sanjay wearing this season?

This is Sanjay Mehta, our intrepid soundman, modelling this year's spring line from the well-known young designer Canadian Tire. Specifically a very chic pair of rubber boots.
These may look like ordinary boots, but in fact they confer on Sanjay an awesome superpower: the ability to walk through water.
If only the rest of us were able to acquire such boots, we could have that power too. But sadly, they are beyond our humble reach, and when the time comes to wade into some gruesome bog, or haul a heavy wooden boat through the shallows, we will have to count on Sanjay to step up. So to speak.
What a shame.

     photo by Ulla Lohmann

Fred the pilot and the three-legged dog

Our helicopter pilot to Bylot Island is a forty-year veteran. He got trained in 1973 and has been flying the Arctic ever since. So our little excursion across the frozen sound is like a picnic for him, I guess. When he shows up to ferry us across, he is just back from helping to rescue 31 people who got stranded when a giant chunk of ice broke off from the floe edge and started floating away with them aboard.
Fred has a three-legged dog named Mukluk who goes everywhere with him, including up in the air. Mukluk has a little blanket set up down on the floor in the copilot seat. Not that we have a copilot, instead, I get to ride shotgun, because John is hogging all the space in the back, with a harness on and his tripod ratchet-strapped down, shooting out the open door. Bet it's cold back there. It's nicer up front, especially with a warm dog on your lap.
As soon as we get back from a fairly long day on the island, and in Fred's case a fairly long day in the air, Fred gets a call. A bunch of hunters he rescued a week or two ago went back out onto the broken ice trying to retrieve their skidoos and stuff, and now they have to be rerescued.
The next morning, I expect Fred to be in the mood to make some kind of sharp comment about idiots that do the same life-threatening thing two times in a row, but he says nothing of the sort. He says he feels for them. They're people who have almost nothing, those skidoos are an important part of their lives and will be very hard for them to replace, and by the time he got there they had been out on the ice for a week and were basically starving. Fred doesn't see it as foolhardy behaviour, he just has compassion for people in a really difficult situation. Fred's a nice guy. Like a flying Dalai Lama.
We tell him we want his direct line. If I do something really stupid, endanger myself, and need rescuing, I want to be rescued by Fred.
And Mukluk. Who is also very non-judgmental.

The view from my window

Early this morning I heard a thump outside my window. I looked out, the top of a stepladder was being positioned there. Then the faces of two small children appeared, peering in. They'd noticed my window was open and climbed up to say hi. Joshua and Jewel. Nice kids. Lucky I had my pants on.

Skipping

If you look out from Pond Inlet across Lancaster Sound early in July, as I just did, the first thing you might notice is that the ice is all broken up into long strips, with channels of clear water running between them. The second thing you might notice is that there are still people out there in snowmobiles.
I had to do a double and then a triple take. Yes, that's right, the ice is melting, there is about fifty feet of open water between the nearest floe and the shore, and people are driving snowmobiles around on whatever is left. Snowmobiles pulling sleds, with a bunch of kids running after them jumping on and off.
I learned that a lot of the strips of water are actually pools of meltwater collecting on the surface of what is still a solid chunk of sea ice, so that's a relief. If you were to drive into one, you wouldn't fall in and drown, you'd merely drive a skidoo through a two-foot deep puddle of cold water, perhaps a couple of degrees below freezing because salt water can get extra cold. Oh, well. That's all right then.
But there is still that little problem of the fifty feet of water between you and dry land. I then learned that it is actually possible to drive a skidoo from ice floe to ice floe across water. You build up enough speed, and it will skim across the water like a jet ski. People who are good at it can cross a hundred feet. It's called skipping.
Think about it. They drive across a hundred feet of water so cold that if you fall in you will be dead in minutes, riding something with all the natural buoyancy of an anchor, in fact they do it for fun.
I would love to film that, it is the most awesome sport I have ever heard of. But I would be too afraid even to stand out there filming it.
I'm trying to think of a word other than "awesome" to use to describe the people who use this death-defying stunt as a normal part of everyday transportation, I already used it once and it is a word that has lost its value in recent years, but I can't come up with one. That's all I've got.
I would be dead so fast here.

Canada Day in Pangnirtung

I had a pretty surreal Canada Day up here in Pangnirtung. It started with a Mountie in full dress uniform unfurling the flag, surrounded by the local Inuit folk. These remote communities don't have municipal police forces, the RCMP are also the local cops, but they have the complete red tunic, riding boots and hat outfit ready to break out for ceremonial occasions. The Full Mountie, so to speak. Then a circle of Inuit elders, children and others sang Oh Canada. "Our home and native land." Literally in this case. It's a bit weird to see these people celebrating the political union of a bunch of French and English colonists a thousand miles south of them a hundred and forty odd years ago. I suppose it's a bit weird to see me celebrate it too, my parents are from Australia.
Then people climbed up on the roof of the church and threw down handfuls of candy. But this is not your typical urban pinata party, first of all they throw so much candy so hard that it's like being pelted with gravel, and secondly, when that candy hits the ground they are serious competitors. Not just the children, either, one elderly lady who couldn't bend down fast enough to beat the kids swarming around her feet was starting to look pretty intense. Finally the slammed her foot down on a couple of candies and got at least some of her share, but it was clear that noone was going to be cutting her any slack.

      Photos by Ulla Lohmann

In the evening they held a feast out by the water, with hot dogs, slices of raw beluga, and an entire seal, cut open and covered with blueberries. There was still a Canadian flag flapping here and there, but this part of the festivities isn't really about celebrating Canada any more, it's about celebrating family, friends, and perhaps most of all, food. It's nice to be able to attend, and many people are delightful, warm and friendly to us. Not everyone, though. I think a lot of TV crews come through here and some people are a bit sick of being documented by outsiders. One group spoke up pretty sharply to say they didn't want to be photographed. But afterwards another young guy made a point of coming over. "Don't mind them," he said, "some people are just like that." I didn't actually mind them, in fact, people are entitled not to be photographed if they want, but I did appreciate him wanting to make sure I didn't feel bad about it. Nice.
The food itself is another touchy issue. These people hunt seal and whale, and there has been a lot of negative attention down south directed at those two hunts in particular. When seal fur got banned in Europe, a lot of people up here lost the thing that was keeping their family fed. And media attention was what helped that happen. People like me. I have many possible reasons to be unpopular here, other than my unusually irritating personality, most places I don't have such handy ready-made excuses at hand, so I appreciate that.

    Photos by Ulla Lohmann

John the cameraman was happily filming the raw seal and blueberries. For him having something visually interesting like that is like a feast in its own right, he'd stay there all day if I let him, but I was starting to be aware that we might look as if that was the only thing we cared about. One woman left the lineup for hot dogs and came over to me. "Are you Greenpeace?" She asked. "No," I said, "not Greenpeace." In a slightly disgusted tone, as if she'd asked me if I had any crack for sale. "All, right, high five!" she said, and we slapped hands. Easiest high five I ever earned. All it takes is to not be from Greenpeace. So, hunting is an issue we clearly need to cover somehow. Maybe people are protecting the wrong animals sometimes for the wrong reasons. Seals got protected because baby seals are cute, for example. People care about whales and dolphins because they've heard they are as intelligent as humans. But I understand that has turned out not to be correct, I believe dolphins are now considered to be closer in intelligence to a pig maybe.
Pigs are fairly intelligent animals, of course, and baby pigs are very cute.
Save the Pigs.

Getting home is half the fun

We went out in a boat to see the last of the sea ice. The outfitter stayed on the boat, and sent us ashore one by one in a little flat-bottomed rowboat, being rowed by his young assistant Lucassee. When the time came to go back the tide had gone down, and the shore was now surrounded by a ring of scattered rocks about three hundred feet from shore, sticking up through the water, way too many of them to get through with a rowboat. The challenge now would be to escape with our lives. Well, not really, the challenge was to escape without getting a soaker in frigid arctic seawater, or waiting several hours for the tide while the people on the boat laughed at us and ate our lunch. There were cookies in there. We had to succeed.
Lucassee took me out in the rowboat first, I assumed he had done this a million times and knew exactly where to go, but then it tuned out he was just searching for a way through the rocks and knew as little as we did. We poked around for a while, then headed back to shore. Then he started trying to figure out if we could haul the boat overland to a better launch area. But that didn't work out too well either. Sanjay the soundman and I turned out to be the only two in waterproof footwear, so we wound up dragging the boat through the shallows. In fact Sanjay did most of the dragging, since he had actual rubber boots and I just had hiking boots. But I was able to stand nearby and offer significant moral support.
By the time we got back on board, the process of achieving it had been way more entertaining than anything we had filmed on shore. We really need a second documentary crew filming us while we film. Comedy gold.

Walrus shopping

A hunter brought two walrus skulls into the lodge to sell. Everyone gathered to take a look, and much discussion followed on whether or not they'd be confiscated at the airport on the way home. Nobody actually knew for sure whether walruses were protected, endangered or goo goo goo joob. Finally a man from Calgary and his daughter bought one each. Meanwhile a sculptor was trying to sell a much smaller walrus made of soapstone, but getting no takers.

Par four

I looked out the window this morning and saw two guys walking towards the water carrying some kind of long shiny pole. Local fishermen, I assumed. Not so. They were playing golf.

Arctic Suburban

Now that all our plans have been changed, and we're no longer heading out of town on a helicopter, we need a vehicle. I was given a couple of numbers of people who had cars for rent; the first was the mayor, the second was the guy who manages the airport. Nobody here has only one job, I guess. We got one at the airport, the guy asked if I knew how to use a clutch. "It's been a while," I said, trying to bring back to my mind a distant memory from the late seventies of what you do with a clutch. The vehicle is a monstrous Suburban from a time when being suburban really meant something. It farts out smoke when you start it, it's missing the grille and has a block heater cable hanging loose in front, it has bench seats a mile wide and you could stuff a moose into the back if you needed to. No air conditioning though. Best rental car ever.