"The Ghosts Above" Behind The Scenes | Lessons From Everest - Renan Ozturk

[Music] hey everybody renault ostrich here sony artisan of imagery really excited to share an early look at our film the ghosts above that took place on chomalongma or mount everest and this is this is a film that's really close to my heart as a climber and going to everest for the first time to climb the mountain really with a perspective of not only climbing the mountain but bringing back something to share that sheds light on what's going on at the roof of the world with the western climbers the sherpas the tibetans there's there's a lot a lot to unpack and especially on a season where 11 people died and viral photos of lines going to the summit went around the world and on top of that we were there on a national geographic assignment looking for a dead body and this is really a collaboration with taylor reese and jay macmillan and logan nelson and so many other people to help bring this really personal look at the mountain alive and give you a greater understanding of what's going on at the roof of the world thanks for thanks for watching [Music] [Music] i never wanted to be here but here i am crawling to the roof of the world [Music] i came here on a national geographic assignment i couldn't turn down to solve one of the greatest mysteries in exploration [Music] and after 20 years of telling himalayan stories and thinking i knew what this mountain was all about this was the climb that changed [Music] everything [Music] big transition today leaving base camp just trying not to forget anything i'm just going to get rid of this p because the p bottle is probably the most important thing of all i have a lot to pour p right here [Music] sorry yeah i think everest has changed a lot since the early days [Music] the 1920s british expeditions were not only inventing high altitude climbing as we know it but also the art of sharing these high mountain cultures with the world their efforts to conquer everest were also the beginning of a complex cultural relationship with the himalayan people [Music] a hundred years later i wrestle with how i'm both a champion of indigenous communities and a colonialist as a photographer it's my responsibility to avoid cliches when i'm among cultures i revere such as the sherpa and tibetans [Music] cliches don't honor the depth of their character nor the complexity of their lives [Music] we began this journey with a puja the ancient ceremony in which the sherpa asks the mountain permission to pass seems like more of a party these days a questionable reflection of the commercialization of tromaluma [Music] everest [Music] dude it gets real now yeah i think it's gonna start to get pretty hard now [Music] mark's in it is the mastermind of this expedition and one of my oldest mentors in 2017 we traveled together to remote eastern nepal to document a himalayan culture outside the limelight of everest this story is solid gold and i'm super lucky to be the writer on this because it's really easy to be the writer compared to being renowned out of control yet i just got stung in the cheek right through the hood [Music] miracle highway one of the sickest hikes i've ever done went on yeah dude that was awesome it was like a little mini summit before this expedition we were all pretty anti-everest but mark got a tip about the whereabouts of sandy irvin who may have been the first to reach the summit with george mallory in 1924 they disappeared in the mist close to the top and never returned mallory's body was discovered in 1999 by some of my closest friends irvine's body is still lost on the north face his camera is rumored to be in his pocket with a summit picture that could rewrite history it's hard to describe how brutal the altitude is it's something that really doesn't translate well on camera all right you guys might want to get ready to receive this [Music] we've been prepping for months and i wish i felt more organized going up high but the truth of the matter is it's just really hard at altitude and nobody's feeling that great it's kind of constant headaches it's hard to form sentences oh wow that coffee's looking kind of thick it's hard to even talk to communicate with the rest of the team are we uh what are we doing today we're waiting for the sun to hit and we're gonna try to make the move to the north coal and it's really really windy out oh we just had some gale force winds take out the solar panel so we have to go to this spot this is very distinctive this horizontal break here in the yellow band and both search areas i think can be oriented relative to this horizontal band everest doesn't get climbed alone these guys are gonna carry some pretty giant loads from 21 000 feet to 23 000 feet which is insane maybe everest reached a tipping point this year pictures of the conga line jamming the upper mountain went viral around the world yes and the media roared in disapproval [Music] but being there i had a different [Music] reaction [Music] camaraderie between the teams no one's denied me a fist bump yet [Music] try to move fast through this section not to get hit by that thing [Music] last few steps to the north pole oh incredible that's the summit you can see the sun you can see the summit holy battle dude that's the hardest thing i've ever done so far just hit a wall how about the rest yeah maybe not enough water or food [Music] with an umbilical cord of fixed ropes in place every inch of the way you can get complacent even confident [Music] but that feeling changed when the mountain unleashed your power hitting us with 140 mile an hour winds holy crap [Music] [Music] [Music] i'm no stranger to the reality of losing friends in this space and i've also had some close calls [Music] a few years back i broke my skull and neck and severed a vertebral artery that affected blood flow to my brain it's questionable now how i'll handle the altitude on this expedition it's just inevitable that someone will get sick first we find out if there's a doctor in baseball yeah let's see if that person will evaluate nick then we just put it straight to them should this guy get to a lower elevation it's a matter of life force and the moment we get here and start engaging with this mountain our life force is going down and our bodies are literally dying up here i would say even having spent a lifetime in the mountains that i didn't really fully appreciate how big a deal it is to be up there i mean we got our kicked it's the first time a storm on north coal has made world headlines yeah yeah it was pretty bad [Music] gonna check on nick no one's really checked in on him for the last 12 hours wow i feel like we need to be careful because if this is something more serious than we think you know i mean he's sitting here at 17 000 feet and he's not getting better you know this is not conducive to health an embolism is a blood clot yeah it can go into your heart symptoms yeah it's like his symptoms they they they line up perfectly they kind of do nick had three blood clots in his legs that traveled to his lungs we were super lucky to make the call to evac him when we did before they hit his heart or brain [Music] so the only other time i've tried to tell an ever story was one specifically to bring to light the sherpa perspective on the mountain death seems to always chase the climbing sherpas as they pit themselves against more of the danger to help foreigners on their guided [Music] ascents this disparity of risk has always troubled me on that trip i saw firsthand the senseless deaths of climbing sherpas when 16 died in front of my lens [Music] [Music] the sherpas canceled the rest of that climbing season an unprecedented show of defiance demanding better life insurance for families and better wages [Music] foreign basically the entire advanced base camp is getting extracted and we're heading up the mountain we'll be the only ones up there now what we should do soon is just spend a bit of time talking with the sherpas if possible yeah get uh lots of little things sorted out yeah are we at a point where we can just lay it all bare now jamie i have a ring okay about a year ago we came up with this idea of coming here to the north side of everest not so much to climb the mountain but to see if we could possibly find um sandy irvine we're probably a little bit in over our heads that's why we're really happy to be here with you guys and have you um support us [Music] they don't know if the sherpas are going to the top or not which is important for them they're saying that they didn't they didn't know our plan so it makes their work really hard yeah hambro hammer mistake matra moff garnist if you spend more than two hours there at three then it will be not good yeah the spirit chances for everyone maybe we can you know just um you know work with them to mold it together into something you know that will work for them basically shanti china any not chadni yohimal um i told him we're not gonna if we don't have peace with these guys we're not yeah we're not going way or nothing work for them friendship hamro um esto um professional co-friendship sub under mata fernando hummer laggi [Music] i feel like we just told them we'll work with you guys we'll do what you need for this trip to to work we were right on the verge of a full-blown mutiny you know thinking from their perspective like i don't know if i would sign up to work on an expedition that wasn't focused on the summit it does seem like the summit might not be the most important to them it's this 8-3 rule because they don't want to get blacklisted yeah we go up to the top and we act like a normal summit team but we scope hozelle's spot which i see as a fairly minor variation on the root i still a little worried as to like what's gonna happen when it's like mark's got his shirt but next to him on the descent and then mark unclips from the rope and starts descending into the search zone i thought the sherpas would be happy not to summit but i was wrong many on our team could potentially summit for the first time a milestone in their careers and crucial for getting more work after much deliberation we're going up to the next camp all sherps packing up weather's coming in a little bit not easy awesome heroes the chinese authorities at base camp send word on the radio that a deadly storm is approaching even though we have a perfect forecast to the authorities all the responsibility for our lives depends on the sherpas yeah we obviously want to try the strippers are calling the shots up here because they have to not only support us above 8 300 meters in the death zone but they have to break down all the oxygen on a subsequent trip which is unimaginably difficult they're carrying three times as much as we are [Music] a little scary snowstorm above 8 000 meters there are conflicting forecasts it's a really hard day it's hard to regulate temperature i think we got a ways to go more than we think [Music] there's the yellow band i can't believe those guys do this with no modern gear by the time we get to high camp everyone is too tired to set up tents so we take shelter and abandon ones that are half frozen into the ice in dumpster dive for food and fuel i'm totally cooked you gonna go for the summit it sounds like we might i'm trying to recover so that i can do so that took a lot out of me [Music] we made it to 8 300 meters at high camp poised for push to where we think irvine is in the summit hopefully mark can hydrate enough that he can search in the way down it's gonna be really hard we're really worked and it's taken a lot out of us just to get to here [Music] to ground myself i think of my loved ones my home my friends friends of friends my world down there in the haze so distant from this world that they seem like figments of my imagination but they and you are the reasons i'm here to show you how it feels and how it looks it is 10 30. we just slept in some abandoned tents up here in the death zone scrounged some random food and against all odds we're launching to try to solve this mystery and maybe even summit it's uh the underdogs parade how you feeling about going rogue at the end of the day let's hope yeah pretty badass those guys climbed they at least made it this far now we're in urban no further like i don't get it it's your willpower the higher we go the more bodies we see even ones from this season i foolishly throw my pack down and my oxygen regulator cracks on a rock it's horrifying gnarly huh i'm more lethargic immediately it feels like i'm dying because i am [Music] i distract myself from the pain by looking into the camera the few moments when i can lift it everything that has led me here swirls together in the jet stream [Music] hypnotically [Music] hypoxically [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] i stopped maybe 10 feet short of the summit i'm not sure if it's out of fear or respect but i promised myself i would never step on the head of their god we're the only team on either side of the mountain lucky moment during such a crowded [Music] season [Music] [Music] we collapse sometimes using bodies as backrests and the sherpas collapse with us concerned for our safety eyeing us carefully so we don't die on their watch but they know we're looking for iron [Music] yes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] mark can't bear to go on without looking and casts off into the void i wish for mark's success but also sensed the stress of the sherbus we're risking our lives but also their livelihoods just to reorder some names in the record book but for us it was never about who got to the top first it was just a detective story something more than a sonnet i went to hosel spot there was nothing there i went against the sherpas which i feel really bad about i almost didn't go but i spent so much time studying that spot i just had to go there even after going to the summit i seriously this is the hardest day that i've ever had in my life [Music] after 24 hours awake back down at high camp 8 300 meters a place of shredded tents and wind stream garbage the earth's highest dump just below its highest [Music] graveyard a part of me is in awe feeling the privilege of standing on the shoulder of the mother goddess of the mountains be able to look out at the entire world another part of me is shell-shocked heartbroken aware now that the ambition it takes to summit everest tends to twist and contort all who come [Music] i never wanted to be here surrounded by ghosts but it's so strangely beautiful i can't make myself [Music] [Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome back thank you so much for checking out the film take a moment to dive a little deeper into the camera tech and some of the ways i think about shooting trips like this that can be applied to really any creative endeavor um but first let me get one thing out of the way one question that a lot of people ask about high altitude cold weather cinematography and photography is how do you keep your batteries warm how do the cameras even work up there and i'll say it all comes down to [Music] really just keeping the batteries close to your body and i'll lay in a little secret here where we we take our our base layers and we sew little pockets so that we can put our sony batteries next to our skin and when we pull them out they're warm and they last i love these batteries anyway but keeping them warm a lot really helps and essentially you're just doing a lot of cuddling with your cameras um and your batteries all inside your sleeping bag every night so it it becomes quite the intimate relationship beyond that i think the the biggest lesson that i i learned on this trip was just one of patience and how to really focus my photography and the technology that i had in specific ways because you don't have a lot of energy up there and it's hard to explain but physiologically when you get to base camp at 18 000 feet your body starts to deteriorate and actually die so you really only have a few number of moments that you can really give this all out energy blast to and you have to to use those those wisely and be patient uh which is something that um i'm not i don't always do sometimes i i overshoot or don't really have a clear concept so um as you saw one of the things um that was really important to me um just having spent a lot of time with sherpa culture um and the nepali speaking side of cultures living below the himalaya was just how do you document how the emotions are of some of those people on the mountain and the relationship between them and the westerners who are there the foreigners who are there to come and climb and stand on the summit and the the technique that we were i was using was you know everybody on the trail would come up to and give a fist bump to and just see what happened and i would hold hold my my a7r iii off to the side shooting silent auto focus while doing that and i was just really surprised on on all these genuine moments of human interaction and connection that that came out of that there's people from russia from india from japan there were tibetans and sherpas and people from the u.s and anybody that you gave a fist bump to even though they were in some of the most intense suffering and pain of their lives like gave you a big smile and and you really felt that sense of of camaraderie and i love how in those situations the camera is really not even part of the scene and we've reached this this point with eye autofocus and the silent shooting where you can just be in a place in a scene and not have it detract and those are moments just along the way that didn't take a lot of extra energy but just took a little bit of a pre-thought um and premeditation of how how can you use this tool to really tell a story that's that's specific and that has emotion and doesn't have you you know working in backwards or in circles especially when you're on such a linear journey from the base to the summit um i think another another another big example of of shots uh that were really specific and focused for me were the yak hurting culture so i've spent a lot of time with the with the sherpa people but i haven't spent a lot of time with the tibetans and on the north side of everest where we were climbing really the yak drivers make it all happen they carry a lot of the goods up a lot of the garbage down and these yaks are incredible they're using their hooves like crampons going up through the ice and the way that i was able to capture some of those shots was just really spending time solely with them instead of hiking down with our with our team mostly from the us i would hike down with them even though i didn't speak their language and and just get them really comfortable with my presence um both both the yak drivers and the yaks themselves because each one of them has this this personality on the trail and after a certain amount of time i'd feel comfortable putting my camera on the trail and putting it in time lapse mode just taking a photo every second and was able to get really unique frames like the shot of the yak lifting its foot very very close a few feet from camera um framing another yak behind or just knowing where to be within the the ice fall on the miracle highway this beautiful blue ice um that i really hope to convey uh and then a few of those those really rare portraits and moments in in the snow in the early season before the weather started getting warmer the last real example and moment i wanted to to dig into more was after our summit day after we had done the search for the body and we were the last team in the mountain everyone was exhausted everyone was running down there was a storm coming in and for me i felt like it was a moment i needed to pause and assess the situation and really appreciate where i was and and really try to to convey this emotion that i was feeling which was hey we're in this place that's pretty much been thrown to the wolves in the media as a as a trashed environment which i could see all around me with tents frozen into the ice and and just trash um everywhere but when you're there alone and there isn't the chaos around you there's it's almost like you can see the beauty within this this whole industry which is still there underneath it as if all these things frozen in ice were like a museum exhibit or an archaeological site that people would discover many many years later if the mountain was ever abandoned and those those quiet moments kind of being the only human [Music] up on the mountain at that point really lent itself to a deep not only a deeper understanding of the mountain for myself but an opportunity to to shoot some of those rare rare frames and it was moments like that that showed patience and restraint which were lessons that i learned time and time again while climbing the mountain just because it was so hard a lot harder than than expected where it were the things that that stick with me that i hope everyone could apply to their own storytelling and whether it's like you know sitting there on on a mountain like tromalogma or everest or if it's heading out into the city in your backyard and knowing the shot in your head that you want or the story that you want to tell and just having that patience that you'll get it staying a little bit extra for that for that magical light and not like rushing from one thing to the next is is really important in this day and age and all this technology that we have at our fingertips makes it really seamless thank you so much and looking forward to answering a few questions now in the live q a [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sony I Alpha Universe

Views: 522,368

Keywords: The Ghosts Above, raw look, behind the scenes of the ghost above, The Ghost Above Full Film, Renan Ozturk, renan ozturk moonwalk, the ghosts above everest, renan ozturk everest, sony films, behind the scenes, sony alpha films, short film, mount everest, mount everest mystery, mount everest renan ozturk, sony alpha universe, alpha universe, The ghosts above everest movie, alpha universe youtube, Sony a7s3 short film

Id: kdqME9bso0g

Length: 48min 1sec (2881 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021