A Film For The Future

Nothing here came from an archive. The three chapters were shot in Iceland expressly for the film, which meant every frame had to be earned on location, inside the weather and the light of a single trip. The hardest was the waterfall: a dive down more than a hundred metres of falling water, straight through it. A drone survives that. A lens usually does not — it comes out beaded and useless, and the canyon waiting on the other side, the shot the whole descent was built to reach, is gone with it. The glacier posed the opposite problem: the light that made it worth flying only existed around midnight, in the few weeks of the year when the Icelandic sun refuses to set.

The waterfall was solved before the drone ever left the ground, with a special hydrophobic coating on the front element so the water broke off the glass instead of sitting on it. The dive goes through the fall and comes out the other side already dry, still rolling, straight into the canyon with its river and its rock formations, in one unbroken move. The glacier was flown at midnight under a sun that never quite sets, with the light lying almost flat across the ice. That is what FPV is for: not a better angle on a landscape, but a camera that behaves like a body moving through it — and here, one that goes through a hundred metres of water and keeps shooting on the far side without a cut.