GAVIN BRENNAN: I got a call in October, or maybe a little earlier, asking if I could come in for an interview to DP a show at Original Productions. I came in and they told me more about it – it was going to be in the Arctic North of Canada, and they wanted to shoot in high-definition.

We looked at the F900 and we looked at the Varicam. A friend of mine had been doing testing with Sony on the new XDCAM HD, and he sang its praises so highly. The fact that it only had, basically, two moving parts inside led me to the conclusion that this was the camera for us. Not having the whole tape pull-down mechanism, or a brittle tape, would certainly behoove us in those field conditions.

Did you consider the Panasonic P2 system?

I did, but hot-swapping small cards that could only take 20 minutes of information? It just wasn’t enough. I was also concerned about using the FireStore on my hip and the delicacy of the camera cable in that situation. And I didn’t want to be in a cold situation pulling out P2 cards with a fully gloved hand. I had used the Sony IMX-format cameras on Burnett shows, and I found them to be really reliable and very sturdy. The availability to have thumbnails was a big issue for me, so the operator could have direct feedback on what type of imagery he was getting.

Was there ever a problem with changing discs in the cold?

Never a problem, never a concern. Never a problem with the door or the drop-down mechanism. It all worked flawlessly. It was really incredible for the first generation of that type of camera. We would leave it out shooting Aurora Borealis all night, and temperatures were dropping well below -40, not including the wind chill factor. And you’d take the camera in, put a battery in it, and it would start up. Incredible.

What other concerns did you have about shooting under those conditions?

Certainly not many people I knew had a lot of experience. I made a call to my mentor Jim Gucciardo, who's been filming in Moscow for two weeks a season. He indicated to me that: one, you’re going to have a big learning curve the first month, no matter how much information you go out with. And two, be aware that anything and everything can freeze and break under those conditions. When I got up there I realized the first thing was completely true. All the advice I got from people was good, but you’re an individual going through that environment so you have to make up your own mind how best to deal with it.

I was most concerned with how the lenses would fog up going from a warm to a cold environment. The environment shifts would be so vast I didn’t know how any camera would hold up to them. The guys at Sony and BandPro were so helpful, saying the XD format was a workhorse. And I can honestly tip my hat to them. That camera was the real hero. It brought us amazingly good footage and handled huge environmental shifts from -45 to body temperatures with no dropouts. I’m totally impressed ‘ I’m sold on that camera 100 percent.

Working in the nonlinear format was very exciting. You could go back and access a thumbnail or a time-lapse you had shot and learn from your mistakes, make adjustments, and get a better shot next time. Also, the ability to have a color representation with that pop-out screen was wonderful. You’re very much a one-man band operating out there. You had a producer most of the time but not all of the time. The black-and-white eyepiece for critical focus was very good. We brought up an F900 for a week, and nobody wanted to use the F900. Everyone wanted to use the XDCAM. We used Anton Bauer HyTron batteries and they were amazing. They never let us down.

Did you research batteries beforehand?

I did, actually. I wanted the [lightweight] Dionics but as always the budget was a concern. It was the first time out with the show, so it wasn’t a huge budget. We didn’t have every toy that I wanted. They said we had to work within a certain budget, which is understandable. I didn’t know how the Dionics were going to handle in that sutuation, though they would have been better in the tight, cramped conditions of a big rig. But the HyTrons were bloody workhorses. They didn’t give up, and they held their charge for a very, very long time in extreme conditions.

How many camera operators were on the show?

At any one time we had four operators. We had a settling-down period because one or two of the guys couldn’t last the trip because they had other commitments. But the four final operators were there for pretty much the rest of the time. I started in mid- to late-January, and I didn’t get back until April. The rest of the guys showed up, like, mid-February. I was the first guy in.

Did you record your own sound?

Absolutely. We would put a lav on our characters and monitor our audio while we were shooting. A lot of the time there wasn’t enough room in the truck for us and the producer. When we were traveling we had a chase vehicle with some local people for drivers, and the producer often either rode in the truck with us or in the chase van.

What about lighting?

We used a LitePanel. I looked at using the Zylight, but I liked the dimmabilty of the LitePanel, its ability to soften down and quickly snap on and off. We mounted it with an Israeli arm, and I liked it rather forward on the lens. We did have trouble because often at nighttime the drivers’ eyes were very sensitive to any kind of light. Infrared lights in the cabs either shook off or fell off. The mounted cameras posed great problems because the trucks shook with such ferocity on the bumpy roads that many of our initial mounts came undone. Some of them worked really well, using mechanical bolting and suction cups. But sometimes the suction cups would break off. And each truck was very different, so it had its own problematic rigging solution.

What else did you do to weather-proof the cameras?

We learned to rubberize the whole camera. We got tennis grip tape and put it wherever there was steel on the lens – the front of the lens, the doubler on the wide-angle lens. On the side of the body of the camera we put rubberized grip tape so your body or hands didn’t stick to any of it, and somewhat insulated it against the cold. We also put reflective tape on the side of the camera and the batteries because most of the time we were working in very low-light conditions and reflective tape gave a warning about our presence on the road. Often we were standing on the road in the darkness.

We had to remove the tripod heads from the legs because it would freeze up from the cold. The locking plate, or the slide plate you had to drop the camera into, because it was made of several different materials they would expand and contract differently in the cold, and they would also stop working. There’s nothing more frustrating than jumping out of the car, grabbing the camera, and the camera would not attach to the tripod because it was so cold. The beating cold every time you got out of that car was just insane. Getting out of the trucks was very difficult hanging onto such a big camera. Mark St. Marie handled all the camera mounting and made sure the problems were all ironed out. He would come back with dropped cameras, and he would have cameras come back in a block of ice. I had a guy hand me a camera he found at the side of the road. It must have been there for days. I put a battery in and turned it on, and it started up. Not a problem.

Did you ever feel like you were in danger?

It’s very easy to be lulled into a false sense of security when you’re out there. These big tough men brush a lot of that danger aside. On the first day I went out with Alex Debogorski, we were going across to a remote mining location, and he said we were, maybe, a little bit overloaded. And when we were coming up to pass another truck, he said, “Now would be time to worry.” My first day out! From that moment, I was a little worried. And I certainly kept my hand on the handle of the door, ready to jump out at a moment’s notice.

It’s easy to become numb to it all. There was no glove system that worked. I would put rubber tape inside the handle of my rocker control on the grip of the lens. You do multiple layers of gloves, but because your hand is above your heart and you’ve got that whole lens resting against your palm where so much blood runs through, your hands would just go numb. You’d be aching in pain. It was extraordinary how that would attack your hand and there was nothing you could do. It’s hard to explain to people that sensation of your hand just not working – not being able to zoom, not being able to do anything.

On the journey up, I caught my hand in a door, and my finger doubled in size and I ended up losing the nail. For a few weeks there, my hand was in great pain. But when you’re riding with truckers, you can’t really sort of roll around in agony and complain about it. They just go, “Well, what?”

It sounds like a very unusual environment, and a pretty taxing one, too, in terms of endurance and sort of sticking to the job and single-mindedly putting the extreme conditions out of your mind to get the shot.

Absolutely. There would be days you’d be following these truckers – and we’d have a 28-hour day. We’d work on a rolling schedule, so you didn’t know when you were going to have a day off, when your day was going to begin or when it was going to finish. You just kept on working. When you do that process month-in, month-out, it’s really amazing. We didn’t even have our own beds. We’d come back and just roll into a bed. You could be up in the bush for five, six or seven days before you could even have a shower.

Is this the most challenging project you’ve worked on?

It was absolutely, physically, the most taxing job I’ve done. But also the most artistically creative one. I’ve worked on bigger shows where you’ve got microwaves and three directors screaming down your headset – “You’re a quarter-stop too hot!” “Turn a little bit to the left!”. To have the freedom to go out and shoot, day in and day out, with the vision that you see, is very refreshing.

You would have been less confident about doing this with a tape-based camera.

Absolutely. I think the days of tape are over. There’s no doubt. Heads can clog up. They get sticky. We’ve all seen what a pull-down mechanism does inside a camera. It’s a very complicated process. If the tape is a little bit cold or a little bit brittle and you’re doing it time and time again – it’s the same with the F900. Sometimes that pull-down mechanism wouldn’t work and you’d have to warm it up a little bit.

It got so cold one morning that the very pixels in my eyepiece stopped working. The pixels in the LCD screen were frozen. Literally you couldn’t shoot. You’d just be pointing at the images you wanted and hope to hell you got it. You hike to the end of a lake or the top of a mountain, and then you’ve got no other option. You’d better point that camera at something and start squeezing the trigger. You go a little bit wider and point in the right direction.

It was a totally unique experience to be in that type of environment, to see the Aurora every night. It makes you proud and happy to be a cameraman, because there’s no better job in the world. [Laughs.] Despite all the rough conditions, bad food and no sleep. You get to see things that people rarely imagine or experience, and you hope to bring that to the viewer. The whole key to being a good cameraman is always, in a sense, being a greenhorn. If you always feel like you’re seeing it for the first time, you can give that to the viewer who’s seeing it for the first time.