Ice Boating above the Arctic Circle

ChapStick goes to Rovaniemi, Finland

Black ice, laced with white webs of blowing snow stretches as far as the eye can see. At 30 degrees below zero, it’s far too cold for the snow to the stick to the glassy black surface and so it blows relentlessly across this vast, frozen lake at the top of the world. At temperatures this frigid, it’s best not expose your skin to the elements for long and so each of us has been given an Arctic Survival suit.

Welcome to Rovaniemi, Finland. Located in the heart of Lapland, this charming city just north of the Arctic Circle is also the reputed home of Santa Claus and his image as a hometown hero is everywhere you look. Finland is a long way to go for a commercial shoot. But we traveled there for a reason. Our ChapStick client wanted a campaign that could memorably demonstrate that their Lip balm was the definitive category leader.  Not only could it stand up to intense wind and freezing cold, it could protect your lips in even the most extreme weather conditions. And so when our creative team presented the concept of ice boating as the ultimate torture test for your lips, the only question was how quickly could we get the concept on film and where could we shoot it.

The copy presented the challenge in very dramatic and cinematic terms and not a word of it changed from the time the story boards were originally presented.

You grip the stick and hiss across the ice
while frigid winds blast you full in the face.
The sport is Ice Boating.
And at speeds up to 60 miles per hour
and temperatures down to 30 below,
you don’t take chances, you take ChapStick.

It was now mid September, 1986 and the commercial was slated to begin airing in late November. As far as we could tell, the lakes in our hemisphere didn’t freeze solid enough for ice boating until well into December. We would have to head very far North to find solid sheets of black ice this early in the winter.  After doing extensive research, our producer Craig MacGowen determined that time trails for Ice Boating were taking place in Rovaniemi, Finland in early November. With some quick post production, we could have our spot completed in enough time to make the air date.

Part of the concept that had gotten our client so excited was the idea of a customized ice boat with a black sail emblazoned with the ChapStick logo flying across the ice. In light of this, two additional challenges immediately presented themselves. Who was going to design and build the ChapStick ice boat and who was going to take it to Finland and race it?

After much research, we located a guy named Henry (whose last name eludes me) who was ranked as the number one American and third best ice boater in the world. As luck would have it, he was not only headed to Finland, he also knew who could take care of building our ice boat.

The weeks rolled by as our ChapStick ice boat went from the design into the construction phase and all the while, we continued to monitor the weather conditions up in Finland. At that point, our production had to remain as fluid as the lake itself. The quicker it froze, the sooner we could shoot. In previous years, this vast expanse of water had frozen solid by the beginning of November.  But lake conditions are as unpredictable as the weather. Our agency and the production company got weekly updates. Fortunately, the closer we got to the end of October, the more it looked like we were on track to meet our production timeline.

Traveling to the top of world seemed to take forever. It involved three planes with each one getting smaller than the one before. The last flight carried about 10 passengers and included some very rural looking locals who were involved with herding livestock. Not surprisingly, Rovaniemi Airport was blanketed with several feet snow. It was both very charming and delightfully warm. On the icy road to the hotel, it was also quite comforting to find that my taxi and, in fact, all of the taxis on the roads were Mercedes-Benz. I had never given much thought to what the Arctic Circle might look like.  But as we drove through the darkness, a big green and white traffic sign suddenly came into view. In the states, it might have just announced a turnpike entrance, but here in the dark and the cold at the top of the world, it read “Arctic Circle. ” I sat back and we drove on to our hotel in frozen Lapland.

Accommodations were Scandinavian modern in design and far more affluent than I had anticipated.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of my hotel room was the heated vinyl floor that extended across the bedroom area and sloped right into the shower. A floor to ceiling curtain was all that separated it from the rest of the room.

In winter at the top of the world, daylight is a precious commodity. The sun rises at 9:00 A.M. and sets at 3:00 P.M. Given the complexity of our shoot, 6 hours a day is not a lot of time to get all of the shots that we envisioned. The athletes, along with their ice boats, were coming were from all parts of the world and getting them to agree to be in our commercial had been in the works for several weeks. Communicating with them was another challenge. To deal with the language barrier, several translators had been hired to facilitate communication with ice boaters, the director and his production team. Time and daylight were extremely limited and with three camera crews, a helicopter camera crew and various production assistants speaking a variety of  languages on their walkie-talkies, the production could have easily devolved into chaos.

And then, of course, there was the cold. It was a bone chilling, core-freezing, potentially deathly cold that was far more intense than any I’d ever experienced before. To protect myself,  I tried to keep every inch of my skin covered. At that time, I had a very full, thick, brown beard which helped to protect my face and in an effort to safeguard my skin, I had my scarf tucked up under my goggles. But even with all of these precautions, the water vapor from my breath soon turned my beard into a solid block of ice.

The first day of shooting went very well. The wind blew hard and consistently across the frozen lake and we were able to get many of the shots that we had storyboarded. Every so often, I did look down and realize that we were all standing on a sheet of dangerous looking black ice. At any moment, it could crack sending trucks, camera equipment and our entire crew into the lake. But since no one else seemed to be concerned, I did my best to put it out of my mind and concentrate on our shot list.

At some point in the late afternoon, I noticed that an old van had pulled up on the ice close to production center in the middle of the lake. The side door slid open revealing two older women stirring what appeared to be vat of steaming stew. Desperate for anything hot, I ventured closer to see what was cooking and walked away with my first bowl of piping hot, reindeer meatballs in a thick brown gravy. I tried not to think of poor Rudolf as I wolfed them down.

When the sun finally set at 3:00 P.M., we were all feeling very positive about the amount and the quality of the shots we had in the can and happily headed back to the warmth of our hotel. We wouldn’t feel nearly as productive when the second day ended. Sunrise on day two found the entire lake covered in a thin film of snow that had fallen during the night. It was not about to melt and had to be cleared away if this footage was going to match what we had shot the previous day. The director then had an ingenious idea of using the wash from the helicopter blades to blow away the snow as it made numerous low passes up and down the lake. But because there was a metal camera seat located outside the helicopter, someone had to sit in it or it would clang incessantly against the side. He wondered if I was up for a little ride. I hesitantly agreed and what followed was an exhilarating experience unlike any I’ve had before or since. Flying, swooping and banking in the arctic chill of an emerging frozen dawn, I was strangely suspended in space. Strapped to the outside of that copter, I felt as though I was a lunatic in a beer commercial on steroids. In my head, the current Schlitz Beer mantra played on a continuous loop… “ You only go around once in life. So grab for all the gusto you can.”  By the time we touched down 30 minutes later, the ice was relatively clean and I was absolutely frozen.

But that day, a light coating of snow proved to be the least of our problems. Because an ice boat requires wind to fly across the ice. And that day, there was none. Like a sail boat becalmed on a flat and lifeless sea, our fleet of iceboats sat on the black ice, their sails barely flapping in the arctic air. With the minutes ticking by and a short six-hour production window, our director was beginning to grow desperate. At one point, he even tried to film an ice boat from our helicopter while using the wash to propel it across the ice at the same time. Interesting concept, unimpressive result. Before we knew it, 3 P.M. was upon us and the sun was quickly dipping below the frozen western horizon. Tired, frozen and discouraged, we headed back to the warmth of our hotel.

On the following morning to our collective relief, the arctic wind roared back with a fury. Shooting commenced with the sun and we rapidly made up for our lack of progress the previous day. Before we knew it, the sun was setting and we were only missing one very important shot, the hero shot of our intrepid ice boater soothing his lips with ChapStick. Now on most shoots, you take care of the wide shots first and save the tight ones for last when the don’t depend on natural light and can capture your image with lights of our own. But when we lost the sun, we also lost whatever heat we had and the temperature suddenly and perilously dropped to 40 degrees below zero. Compounding the issue was the fact that our ice boater was already dangerously chilled to his core from long hours out in the frigid temperatures. In fact, he was so cold, he physically couldn’t hold our black and white ChapStick tube to his lips without his hand visibly shaking. In between takes, we tried plying him with hot chocolate and heat lamps, but when we rolled the camera, the lip balm barely made it across his top lip when his hand when into wild and uncontrollable spasms.

At this point, all we needed to wrap the shoot was the simple application of our product. But he just couldn’t make his hand stay still.  And so, with the arctic wind howling around our heated tent, we put our impatience in check and waited for his core body temperature to return to normal. It took over an hour. And then, we only got one application shot. Just one. But it was enough to finish our commercial and head home.

The final spot was all that everyone had hoped for. We had returned from our perilous trip to the top of the world with everything we needed in the can. A long way to go for a commercial for sure and an adventure whose memory still gives me chills.