Our friends at the National Geographic Channel called upon us to craft a powerful, filmic promo package to announce the eighth season of Life Below Zero: The Thaw. The show follows six people who live in remote areas of Alaska, all trying to survive in below zero conditions. The NGC team provided ours with references from the previous seven seasons so we could stay clear from what had been done before. We designed several treatments, ranging from an icy cold countdown to thaw season to shooting time-lapse plates of frozen water thawing over stones, grass and soil.
We ultimately filled an aquarium with earthly debris and flanked it with large panes of ice. Lit primarily with natural daylight, the ice was melted carefully with boiling water and constant heat from fire. We captured these beautiful moments at high speed so we would have the ability to work with ramping the clips in post.
NGC also provided us with an amazing edit by Mattock cut to audio by Defect Sound. The pacing and energy of the edit informed our animation and compositing decisions as we built out a full system of promo deliverables. As always, we built each element with the end user in mind. We supplied an exceptionally intuitive toolkit to maximize versioning efficiencies for the NGC team.
