By Joy Zaccaria, July 27, 2007
A fascination with walruses and a mission to push into the Arctic unknown led to a decade of harsh survival and incredible documentation for directors Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson (Ravetch’s wife) in making Arctic Tale. With a get-the-shot attitude under some extreme polar circumstances, the varied film and video formats put to use over the nearly 10 years of production meant a challenge in creating a consistent look for the story of polar bear and walrus families and their survival in a changing environment.
Produced by National Geographic Films, the American theatrical distributor of March of the Penguins, and distributed by Paramount Vantage, Arctic Tale chronicles the lives of polar bear and walrus families in the Arctic above Canada through a character-driven storyline and narration by Queen Latifah. While the film’s wild stars attempt to survive in their harsh environment like the many generations before them, their ancient ways of survival are changing. The very ice that makes up their kingdom is melting. In addition to the adventure story of “unsinkable family devotion,” the film depicts the changing climate of the Arctic and how its vagaries are threatening the survival of these wild animals.
Polar bears and walruses make for unpredictable subjects. The process of getting shots required Ravetch, principal cinematographer for Arctic Tale, to endure stakeouts, long waits and long runs while ingratiating himself with the wild animals.
For the underwater scenes, Ravetch shot film early on. The team turned to video cameras once that technology became viable for underwater work. To shoot the walrus world under a sheet of ice in HD, for example, Ravetch used the Sony HDC-F950. “You get one or two good filming days out of a month,” explains Ravetch. Those rare days often yield footage of animals in their natural state, such as a mother walrus nursing her baby under water.
Chris Miller of Visionbox Media Group in Hollywood is a co-producer of the film and was in charge of postproduction. “The film came to us in a lot of different formats,” he says. “Regular 16, Super 16, 35mm, HD, Beta SP, DigiBeta, you name it.” Visionbox transferred the different formats to HDCAM SR. The ratio of film to video in the final work is about 70 to 30.
In the interest of keeping the images consistent over the two years of editing, “we had some rules about what type of footage we wanted to use,” says Visionbox’s Miller. “Above water, for the most part, we wouldn’t use anything [of a resolution lower] than HD. Below water, we were more liberal about what we were willing to use. The audience doesn’t necessarily know what it’s supposed to look like underwater, so they’re not bringing any context to it.”
Ravetch’s background in marine biology and years of high-level scuba diving played a big role in influencing the style of his underwater cinematography. “Water is 800 times denser than air,” he notes. “With any subject, you have to be close and wide to get clear pictures. The intimacy you get from that closeness is something we really pushed for, both above and under the water, to bring our audience right in the heads of the animals.
“Once you’re in front of a mother walrus that has accepted your presence, to have the video camera is invaluable. A [film] magazine would have been 11 minutes, and then we would have had to pull out of the water [to reload], and they might have swum off,” he says. “To have an hour or 45-minute takes is better to capture something so remarkable.”
Above the ice, the production team would be using HD and ARRI SR2 16mm film cameras in -30 degree temperatures. To accommodate the cold, they used a custom-made polar cover with sleeves inside for chemical heating pads. Unfortunately, that setup was very heavy. “In some cases, we couldn’t take the big, heavy cameras with a heavy housing—an 80 lb. package,” Ravetch notes.
In instances where he had to stay both mobile and nimble to get a particularly fleeting shot—“There were times I even ran across about a mile of ice to get to an opening for footage we would end up using”—Ravetch turned to the smaller, lighter Sony HVR-Z1U HDV camcorder.
During the two-year edit process, Ravetch and Robinson worked out of an edit suite at Pivotal Post in North Hollywood. “At one time we had five Avids going simultaneously. We had three assistant editors and up to three editors, along with Sarah and myself,” notes Ravetch. The Avid equipment was provided by Pivotal Post. “Having blown up some of these smaller formats, we’re very pleased with how this film looks on the big screen.”
Digital intermediate services for Arctic Tale were provided by LaserPacific in Los Angeles. Mike Sowa served as digital intermediate color timer. Color correction took place on Pandora Pogle and Autodesk Lustre systems at LaserPacific. “Pogle is really good for on-the-fly grade reduction,” explains Miller. “It was close to a real-time grade reduction so we could see what we were doing.” After a lookup table was applied, the video master was rendered.
Over the course of shooting, a product invented by extreme sports cameraman and director Steffan Hewitt became indispensable to Ravetch: the Polecam. Hewitt actually journeyed to the Canadian Arctic to operate the Polecam unit for the film.
The production team would mount their small Ikegami HDL-20 HD camera to the Polecam to capture shots such as the walrus migration sequence when the animals had moved to a remote island. The Polecam, a single-operator jib arm, served the team well in the inaccessible Arctic locations by acting much like a lightweight, portable crane with a reach of up to 20 ft.
“The Polecam was something I always dreamt of using to get more of a cinematic feel. It allowed us to get that angle on the walrus herd migrating that I was never able to get on a handheld camera,” notes Ravetch.
The 1080i HD-SDI output of the compact Ikegami camera head was recorded via a Panasonic AJ-HD130 DVCPRO HD VTR. Also instrumental on this extremely remote location were batteries from Stuart Cody and Expedition Batteries in Massachusetts. The production team could not afford to have the battery run out in the midst of shooting remarkable but short-lived animal behavior.
Ravetch and Robertson owe their film production success—and basic survival—to their local Inuit guides. The Inuit, the indigenous people of the Canadian Arctic, are expert trackers and hunters. “We would always work closely with them. They were able to find the animals quickly,” explains Ravetch. “We were told by the local Inuit not to swim with the walruses because that is an animal that could knock our heads off with one smack of its tusks and suck our brains out.”
The couple’s early trips to the Arctic lasted about two months at a time. As they learned more about the various behaviors of walruses and bears, they would stay anywhere from six to eight months a year.
For the better part of a decade, Ravetch and Robertson were based out of a town called Igloolik in the northern Foxe Basin of Canada.
Working in the Arctic, “there was no way we could get the rushes out of location, so we just put the footage in a waterproof bag that we kept with us. Sometimes it was months before we saw the footage,” Robertson notes.
“The biggest problem with that was wondering if there was a hair in the gate,” says Ravetch. “In the winter, we’d be wearing parkas that shed caribou hair. So I would tell people to get away from me when I was changing a magazine.”
The couple and their various camera crews over the years camped on the frozen ocean, known as land-fast ice when it’s physically attached to the land. Thirty miles out from where the ice stops and open water begins is where the walruses live. Ravetch recounted a story that evokes a sense of the patience and dedication required by the filmmakers to bring Arctic Tale to the screen. Ravetch and his Inuit guide were crossing the pack ice in a boat to retrieve another boat that had drifted off. They themselves drifted for 72 hours after the engine stem of their boat failed, and they had to paddle into the pack ice for protection from the Arctic blizzard waves that were ramping up. They were finally rescued by Brad Parker, the outfitter they worked with in Igloolik.
“We kept filming, though. That was the beauty of it. We kept filming, and then we would radio our position based on the sun and where we thought we were,” says Ravetch. “In these situations, you keep filming. You get some very unusual imagery based on your problem—the situation you got yourself into.”
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