The cameras aren't working, and it's
getting super frustrating.
This is what it's like on "Life Below Zero."
The camera's already down, tough conditions all
around to film in.
WOMAN 1: No heat, no power, no anything.
Ah, it won't even turn on.
WOMAN 2: I've fallen too many times.
We have bad winds.
It's just a typical day in the Arctic.
MAN: Making best of what we got.
BEN MULLIN: The challenging environment
that we deal with up here in Alaska
for getting the cool shots that you see on "Life Below Zero."
And we're out in the middle of nowhere.
AGNES HAILSTONE: Today, Cutin and I
are gonna be getting some wood.
I have a grandbaby coming in.
And I want to try to keep my grandson
nice, comfortable, and warm.
Idi just had a baby, so she's bringing him
to meet the rest of the crew.
So this looks like a pretty good spot
to launch our drone, which is one of my personal favorites
things to do on the show.
And shooting drone is super fun.
I love doing it.
But it comes with a bunch of different challenges
that are hard to overcome, especially when it's cold.
And most of them are related to the cold.
The monitor that I use is an iPad.
And I use this heating blanket with a battery
to keep the iPad warm.
And then when I'm shooting the drone, because it's cold
and my hands are pretty stationary,
and I can't take them off in the cold
to shove them in my pocket, I use these fingerless gloves.
You need to have fingertip dexterity in order
to do the controls and especially
to touch the monitor because it's a touch screen monitor.
I certainly can't be taking on or off gloves.
And I also can't have my hands freeze.
Here are my batteries, which each have
a hand warmer attached to them to keep them warm.
I put my monitor in it's monitor frame.
I'm trying to do all of this stuff
as quickly as I can so that stuff
doesn't start freezing, literally,
while I'm putting it together.
I bring, believe it or not, it's a regular, standard bath mat
that you probably use in your own bathroom.
It's got a fuzzy side, and it's got a rubberized side that
usually goes down on the floor.
Well, this rubberized side, it can take off and land
on it with no problems.
About half the time, we get to this point,
and the drone just decides it doesn't
want to fly in zero-degree temperatures,
which is what it is today.
So hopefully, it flies, and we'll get some good shots.
If something does go wrong, we're in the middle of nowhere.
And we might not be able to get another drone.
We can't go down to the corner store and buy another one
or get it fixed, even if we have other technical difficulties.
And so we've just got to figure it out on the fly.
So the drone itself is a really amazing and unique device
for us to get really cool footage for the show,
especially because the terrain in Alaska
is so amazing and vast.
It really is useful to show the place of a teeny human
in this giant background.
Alaska is amazing, and it doesn't
get any less amazing from 300 feet in the air.
CROFTON DIACK: Snow tomorrow, so I'm not sure we're
going to make it into Kavik.
We're going to give it a hell of a try,
but we're ready for anything.
SUE AIKENS: The buildings look intact.
I can see some pretty big tracks.
And also, I'll just have to walk up.
We're going into Kavik for the first time.
And Sue's been away for a couple of months.
So it's sort of a big deal.
And we have to figure out, one, and always first,
the safety of the mission.
And so we're flying in with a ski plane.
And we want to document our arrival and our departure.
So tonight, everybody's putting cameras up and figuring
out where to put the camera.
We're trying to rig up this plane
and put these GoPros on it and try to figure out our angles.
I'm trying to rig up a GoPro, trying
to find a good spot for it here inside the plane
so that when Sue is traveling, we get some good shots of her
and get shots of what she's flying over.
We have to put these little cameras, these GoPros,
in weird places.
And we can't always see what's on them, so we have
to connect to it on a phone to figure
out just what we're shooting.
All this takes longer than we think to get the right angle,
to get the proper little clamp that the machinist is making.
It's good we came tonight and got it sorted.
PILOT: Good, clean snow here.