Perhaps nowhere on Earth like Antarctica tests the old wisdom of there being no bad weather, only bad clothes. For cinematographer Bertie Gregory and the National Geographic team that embedded around the Ekström Ice Shelf in order to shoot the documentary series “Secrets of the Penguins,” cold weather gear was as important as the cameras and lenses they deployed to capture some never-before-seen footage of Emperor Penguins doing way more than marching.
Gregory told IndieWire that the packing list to overwinter in Antarctica starts with what a camera operator wears on their hands. “That’s make or break. Hands are what get cold first. When we’re operating a traditional camera, you can use big mittens that can be very comfy in minus-30 degrees Celsius or below. The problem really comes when we’re using newer technology — when flying drones, you need a lot of dexterity to operate those precisely.”
To solve the problem of retaining fine motor control in beyond-freezing temperatures, Gregory rewired some heated gloves so that they could run off of camera batteries. “My hands were plugged into the camera, basically. When I first heard about heated gloves, I was like, ‘Aw, does that mean I’d be a bit soft? Then I used them and it was like, ‘I have no problem being soft. Work smarter, not harder.’ That was a game changer,” Gregory said.
For the humans, anyway. Cameras don’t like extreme cold, either, but the below-freezing temperatures were not as much of a problem as perhaps civilians might think they were on this Nat Geo nature documentary. “The thing that kills cameras is temperature change. It’s warming cameras up versus keeping them cold,” Gregory said. “ Fortunately, on the shoot, we were camping, so we had no warm place. Once the cameras were cold, they were cold.”
In advance of the shoot, Gregory and his team freezer tested some camera options to make sure everything they bought with them would stand up to the elements — once in place in Eastern Antarctica, roughly 3,000 miles from McMurdo Station and much, much further to the nearest B&H, they’d have to make do with what they had. The National Geographic show eventually chose the RED with the ultra-telephoto Canon CN 20 lens set, which can stretch from 50-1000mm.
“We chilled [the cameras] right down and stress tested them, saw what breaks. And it’s really the cables that snap first. So we had special custom cold-tolerant cables made from a material that gets less brittle than normal,” Gregory said. “And we just took a lot of spares.”
But some of the most important camera equipment that “Secrets of the Penguin” used were its drones, which not only offer an important sense of scale and place to the viewer but can open up environments to the camera team they wouldn’t be able to navigate otherwise. They’ve been available to nature documentaries for years now, but Gregory said that the increased flight time and more powerful lenses on this current generation of drones really opens up new opportunities to see things we never have before.
“Drones, if flown incorrectly, are potentially disturbing for the wildlife, right? So the fact they’ve got more powerful lenses on them now means that we can fly further away from the action and still get shots; and the longer battery life means that we can hang in the air and wait for things to unfold. That’s not something we could do previously,” Gregory said. “There are so many scenes that were only possible because of the new drone technology, so it was cool to be able to utilize that to capture a penguin secret.”
Getting a new view of penguins is especially gratifying because so much of the job of a nature documentarian is, perhaps unexpectedly, dealing with humans. “The job is 99 percent problem solving and logistics and like one percent is hanging out with animals,” Gregory said. Penguins are a bit more sociable and followable, living as they do in colonies, so the cinematographers can get to know their subjects better over the course of a shoot.
But however much time a team spends in the wild, Gregory told IndieWire that the key to grabbing successful footage from that one percent of animal time is not patience. “I think far more important are two other Ps: Passion and Persistence. You need to be constantly obsessed with the cues that Mother Nature is giving you so you can find and keep up with the animals, predict what they’re going to do next,” Gregory said. “And persistence is key. You’ve got to be quite stubborn. I’m going to sit here and get really cold and wet, or whatever, and eventually, something good’s going to happen.”
“Secret of the Penguins” is streaming on Disney+.
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