From capturing fireworks and marriage proposals to actual weddings, the use of drones to augment photography and video recording is quickly becoming a ubiquitous practice in America. It’s not too difficult to imagine a future where cameras and drones are commonly bundled together at every electronics store, a world where a Luddite might just have to flee to the edge of the world — perhaps the South Pole — to escape the buzzing noise of the flying devices.
But for our hypothetical hermit, there is no escape: a Swedish man recently sailed across Antarctica, capturing his 16-day odyssey in hours of HD drone footage so viscerally stunning, you can expect copycats to continuously make similar treks to the swathes of ice caps down under for the next century.
Photographer Kalle Kjung met up with his father — who is on a three-year voyage across the world — in Argentina in December, then proceeded to Antarctica in their 46-foot sailboat.
His filming equipment was simple enough: he used a GoPro HERO3+ camera mounted on a DJI Phantom 2 drone, and edited more than 4 hours of raw footage into an 8-minute clip with Final Cut Pro.
The bulk of the video features grand, sweeping shots of the arctic glaciers, ensconced between the azure skies above and the viridian sea below, mostly by themselves, and occasionally with a small objects — a lifeboat, a sailboat, and Kjung’s father — in the foreground to accentuate the towering scale of the ice blocks.
Kjung had originally filmed his trip solely for recreational purposes, and the enthusiastic reception — it’s racked up more than a million views so far — the video has received on the internet was unexpected, he told Wired.
As a hobbyist, Kjung’s plans to make more drone-montages of landscapes in the future — his next target? New Zealand.
