Chasing Ice

This semester I have had the fortune of being able to produce a documentary and start to understand what it is that goes into a documentary. It's a very different shooting style than fiction but I think they are still after the same goals. After seeing what it takes just to make a student documentary I thought back to all the amazing documentaries I've seen in the past. I was able to fall in love with them again now that I have a better understanding of what is going on, one of those being Chasing Ice. Chasing Ice is a documentary about a National Geographic photographer named James Balog trying to document the drastic changes that are happening on our Earth. The thing that I love about how Balog did this documentary is how he addressed the problem in his documentary. How can I take the immense amount of layers of reason, science, and controversy that go into climate change and put it into one storyline that accurately represents the issue and depicts what is happening? James Balog took the most captivating and sympathetic aspect that everyone can stand behind and that's the beauty of nature. He is intentionally making the ice look alive and he does this very well. Then once we have fallen in love with the beautiful ice of the Arctic, he shows us it's destruction through time lapse. At the time James was making this, technology was actually fairly limited for a time lapse camera that could survive the relentless weather of the Arctic. Consequently James invented a heavy weather proof, timed camera and mounting system for the sake of this project. It wasn't easy though and he documents his struggle with this system over a matter of years but the amount of work and pain that went into this created some of the best videos documenting the destruction of glaciers. Unfortunately through the making of the documentary James body also takes a toll. His knee's start giving up on him and he pushes it to the point where he is putting others in danger because of his health. He then takes the media front and starts giving speeches. The story is immensely powerful and in my book is a successful documentary because it makes you aware but most importantly want to take action.

And all of the shots of the ice they get are just breath taking. They are clearly National Geographic photographers. The way they play with the shapes and the natural light and colors of the ice is beyond me. Working on something like that is a dream for me.