Acclaimed photographer James Balog was once a skeptic about climate change. But through his Extreme Ice Survey, he discovers undeniable evidence of our changing planet. In Chasing Ice, Balog deploys revolutionary time-lapse cameras to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate.
Traveling with a team of young adventurers across the brutal Arctic, Balog risks his career and his well-being in pursuit of the biggest story facing humanity. As the debate polarizes America, and the intensity of natural disasters ramps up globally, Chasing Ice depicts a heroic photojournalist on a mission to deliver fragile hope to our carbon-powered planet.
"I was connected to James Balog through a good mutual friend, and we met on occasion in Boulder, Colorado every time I visited. I was a photographer, and a huge fan of James’s work, and really wanted to work with him. In 2007, he started his project called the Extreme Ice Survey and I offered to help for free. I went with him and a team to Iceland when he started installing his first time lapse cameras, and I filmed the entire trip. It was mostly just to document what he was doing, and to have a record of the project. Then I went with him to Greenland, and then Alaska, and then kept traveling with him, filming everywhere we went. Over time, we had collected a great archive of the project, and I knew we could make a great film out of it. There have been so many efforts to document climate change, but this one was unique As James’s time-lapses started to come back from the field, we knew the project was working. So I put all my efforts into making a feature doc, built a world-class team to support me, and spent the next few years dedicated to ice."
- Jeff Orlowski
Read more about Jeff Orlowski here
Perreault Magazine - 25 -
JAMES
BALOG
CHASING ICE
DIRECTED BY
jeff orlowski
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