Land of Ice and Snow (January, February 2015)

Last winter I had the privilege of experiencing a great deal of winter activities with two video projects.

The first was an inception of my own, an idea I had hatched the previous winter: to test the best hills of Rovaniemi for riding a sled! And what a blast we had! The video was produced once again for Vasa-Tv and is my magnum opus of the series. It is fascinating to follow my improvement as a filmmaker between the first video from two years ago to this one here. The greatest difference between "The Great Hill Test of Rovaniemi" and every other video is that instead of two days, I gave three weeks for this project. You can instantly see the higher production value. This is a good product to possibly end my career as a video producer for Vasa. Possibly.

SUURI ROVANIEMEN PULKKAMÄKIVERTAILU
(Finnish only)

We were extremely lucky with filming the material. We had only one day that suited the entire group, and Lady Fortune was benevolent enough to cast a perfect day for just us. Prior, it had been very cold and on the following morning started a snow storm that would last a week. But we got it all, the winter wonderland of dreams. The great spirit we possessed and that is visible in the video itself, is much in debt to the magnificent weather.

Unfortunately, the snow did create one problem. It was too bright and even though it seemed on my editing screen to look ok, once I uploaded the video onto YouTube and watched in other screens, the snow was severely burned, mostly already in the raw material. A good lesson this project was. Beware the brightness of snow when filming in winter.

Our team: Me, Emma (reporter), Jussa (cinematographer) and Atso "The Stiga-Stig" (Test driver)

The second adventure was courtesy of the local production company Flatlight Films. They had run into a small actor crisis and were in the need of one guy and one girl for an advertisement that was scheduled to be shot in two days far north in the fells of Saariselkä. A couple of quick calls and I got our sled-test reporter Emma to jump in. The next day, it was to the North. For the first time ever, I got to ride a SNOW MOBILE! (Which is about time. 20 years in Lapland and so...)

Once again the weather was marvelous, though the winds of winter had shrugged off most of the snow on trees. Still there were enough spots with full snow cover to please the customer's requests. Bringing Emma with us turned out to be a lucky strike, since she had worked for safaris before. The scene in which the men of our trio try to escape the suopunki (Lapland's lasso) wielding Emma was completely improvised, an idea suggested by her. All of us agreed that it gave the video a nice touch of eccentricity and humor, giving it some extra character. Emma also had her share of misfortune, caching an eye infection the previous day. Yet, a quick trip to the doctor for antibiotics and a pair of shades and our actress was back in action.