Hi I'm Mike Pfau, and I'm Trenton Pasic, and we just got back from Vanuatu and we were
shooting at a lava lake in the Ambrym Volcano. We get a lot of questions about how we get
our shots and how we actually can pull footage out of an active volcano and so that's what
we're here to talk about.
It was definitely the most extreme environment that either of us had ever been in, and we
pretty much knew nothing about it before we went there.
Less people have been to the bottom of this crater than have been to the moon.
Vanuatu for those who don't know is an island chain, several islands, they're mostly all
volcanic, and it's west of Fiji by several hundred kilometers.
So you have to fly multiple airplanes to get there, take a puddle jumper to an even smaller
island that has no roads, no technology, nothing, and then from there get to the top of volcano
that you can't just walk to the top of, so you have to helicopter to the top of that,
and then when you're there it's still a 1200 foot descent down the most unstable, gnarly
terrain that you've ever seen to get down to the actual lava lake.
We were camping up on top of the volcano for 13 nights. I made it down to the bottom three
times and we actually made it down there to shoot two different times.
To repel down the cliff face, starting from top to botttom is 1200 feet and to get four
people down there, one person has to be on the lines the whole time because you can knock
a rock on the person below you so for safety reasons we're staggering how people get down,
so it can take anywhere from four to five hours just to get down to the bottom with four people,
and that's inside of a good weather window, which is constantly changing.
We had a fairly in depth shot list before we went out to Vanuatu. A lot of them were
flying helis over the lake, having TimeLapses that hang out down at the bottom overnight,
the classic gnarwhal shot. Getting a drone out over the lava was such a big one that
we brought six drones down there with us to make sure that we got that shot. I mean, we
started losing them pretty much on day one.
"Did you lock that on?" "Next one."
So that's how we lost the first drone, and from there, the rest of our equipment came
back pretty destroyed as well.
So there's this little window in which we had the opportunity
to fly the chopper. It's right near dusk. That was one of the reasons for opting into
shooting a lower frame rate just because we wanted to slow it down, but we also wanted
things to expose properly and look phenomenal.
We had wanted to get some TimeLapses from the bottom of the crater so since I was down
there, I scoped out a good spot that shows the lava lake, or at least the glow from it
and it kind of shows how it moves and breathes and lives, and decided to set up a Time Lapse
down there. Just to make sure that the elements weren't going to get to it as much as I possibly
could, I used an open Backdoor on the actual housing plus I put in Anti-Fog Strips just
because there's so much moisture down there, I just wanted to keep anything like that away
from the lens. Placed the camera down and let it roll, one photo every two seconds,
and just left it. I ended up leaving, which takes a couple of hours to get back out.
"Halfway up, this is pretty gnarly."
It wasn't a guarantee that we'd even make it to the bottom, to even place the camera,
much less make it back down again to retrieve the camera. Dropping one camera for the shot
was definitely one we were willing to take.
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