Alps, vertigo and global warming

Prepp started easy: drafting a route, gathering inspiration images, making a shot list, finding a car … a car that fits the rail. A rail that has only been tested on a handful of cars.

How hard can it be. shit hard.

Regular gas-stations won’t let you drive outside Sweden. That left us with Sixt, Europcar and Avis.

Sixt has zero of the cars we need. Europcar perhaps one or two.

That left us with Avis. After a bit back and fourth with Avis Linköping and Norrköping we finally got approval to use a Kia ev6.

Shotlist: - Mounted closeup - Mounted on the hood filmning Niklas - Mounted on the back filmning the wheels of the bike - Mounted on the back filming the skiis - Driver and passenger door open. niklas walk around the car and gets the bike

Charging stations - Since we drove and electric car we were hevily relying on carhging stations on the way there and home.

I hade made a private trip to Italy and back last summer so I was familiar with Ionitys layout in Europe. They have a station every 15-25 km so for the travel down and back we were safe. My concern was in the alps. It’s totally offgrid from the

Sun rise and sun set in the alps I quite often use ShadowMap to see when and where the sun rises and sets. It’s perticarlu useful when filming interviews outdoors or in location with a lot of windows. https://app.shadowmap.org

Moodboard

Batteries, powerbanks and more batteries. My biggest fear was to miss a lot of shooting time due to drained batteries and no possibility to charge. So I ordered a bunch of new batteries for the camera, drone and external recorder.

Plus I brought my big battery pack that could be used in an emergency.

Prepp for the Mont Blanc Group project continues.

Getting a car that both fits the unreleased rails and was rentable turned out waaaaaaay harder than we thought. Finally, with a lot of help from Avis Linköping we got a blue Kia ev6.

So tomorrow I will test the stability of the camera rig on the roof and prepp the drone for the follow shots.

Since we will be in the car, away from electricity I’ve gotten a few more batteries for the drone, camera and lights.

With these additions I can now film for 8–10 hours and ﬂy for 3+

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So, it’s been a long day testing the Delkin Fat Gecko car mount.

The test’s main purpose was to see if the suction was reliable and if it was possible to place the camera at an angle so that the rails and the reﬂections in the roof would be visible.

I started by attaching the camera directly to the mount. The suction was reliable, and I drove up to 80km/h.

Since I don’t have the rails yet, I had to use one of my magnetic phone stands and the car’s wing as a reference. Without it, it would be impossible to see if the footage was stable.

The second test was to attach my Ronin S gimbal to the Delkin mount to see if the footage was more stable.

Lessons learned: 1: I’m super happy with the tests. We will get great footage once in Schweitz. 2: The gimbal-mounted camera gives more stable footage 3: Any speed above 30 km gives wiggles and wobbles if the road isn’t super smooth. So, in the Alps, we have to stay below 30 km/h. 4: The cold will be an issue since I have to do everything outdoors. So I’m packing a ton of clothes.

My hotel room on the morning of the first say in Sälen. The other riders arrived later in the evening for the riders-dinner, so I packed for a full day of location scouting. The total route is 262 km so I didn’t manage to scout it all before the dinner. I used the Ride app to mark out and keep track of locations where I wanted specific footage.
It could be a lake, hill, bridge. Handling of gear, switching lenses and general keeping track of things was way harder on the shoot since we were constantly moving and and everything got covered in dust.
Trying to balance the gimbal going 70km/h was a nightmare :-) Alte text 3 Niklas Hellerstedt from Guided Heros, my co-pilot for the two days. Fredrik Rydén – Concept- and eventmanager at SkiStar Sälen Alt text goes here

In the Alps

To get as much film time in the alps as possible we started 04:30 from Gothenburg. From there it was a 1200km drive down to the furka pass.

Perhaps we were a bit naive cos the roads were foggy, the sun went down at 4:30 pm and there were constructions, accidents and sometimes ques to the charging stations.

But we digged in, relay-slept and made it all the way to Andermatt (1437 möh) 02:00 where we had booked rooms at the Radisson Blue for two nights.

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Trip music: Somewhere between Hanover and Kassel Rangeklods ”Violently patient” came on in my earphones. I put it in repeat and it became the tripmusic for this project.

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The Furka pass

It looks innocent. The road up from the village of Realm (1538 möh) to the pass is 12 km of stunning winding alp roads. The accend is 898 meters.

They have filmed car chases for James Bond movies here.

There were 60+ yrs bicyclists, motorcyclist and locals casually driving up and down.

We. Bloody hell. We had white knuckles and spänningshuvudvärk cos the protective rails were absolutely minimal. At its best it was concrete spikes, at its worst it was a plastic snowpole evert 10 meters.

Driving up and down was absolutely terrifying.

Filming

The filming part was amazing. I wore long-jhons, an long sleeve base layer, insulation layer and windbreaker shell jacket tröja.

After 30 min I had to change to only sweatshirt and baselayer.

The sun was gassing and it was 15-18 degrees and almost wind still.

Nice, hell yes but it shouldn’t be like this, this far up in the alps in November.

At breakfast day 2 I showed everyone the Zero Day Edit.

The Rhone glacier

Next to the Hotel Belvedere is the Rhone glacier … or at least used to be. In the 1800-hundreds it went from the too of the mountain almost all the way down the valley. Today its more like a sad ice-plätt melted into a lake that looks like a quarry.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Picture-showing-the-retreat-of-Rhone-glacier-Swiss-Alps-since-1850-Source_fig1_295918492

image: Drone photo of the glacier

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