How I Climbed a 1000m Wall With No Ropes & Filmed it

So last year I made the first freesoul ascent of Sharag, which is a 1000m high wall in Norway, with around 800-900m of vertical rock face. This year a film about the climb came out on Brit Rock Film Tour, and since it's release there have been multiple questions about how it was filmed, as it's very different to any climbing film that has previously been released. The majority is shot in a POV style, with a camera next to me, but what is quite unique is the amount of angles that I managed to capture around a single shot. So originally the film was meant to be done in a more traditional climbing adventure film style, with top down filming from a cameraman, interviews and the usuals of what you'd expect from an adventure film production. Alistair Lee, who is an international award winning adventure film producer would have come to Norway to direct the film, and then the story would have rolled out from this. The cliff is actually desperately hard to get in good condition, and to get it in condition for a free solo is probably down to one day a year. Then to get this day to line up with your mental headspace to do it, plus having someone there to film it and finally line it up with all the filming permits, to say the least, is pretty tricky. The reason this cliff is so hard to get in good condition is down to the seasons in Norway. In winter the cliff is covered in ice and snow, in spring the snow and ice melt which creates huge waterfalls on the faces, and then in summer the waterfalls start to dry up slowly, but actually by this time the leftover ground moisture has had time to soak and start seeping through the cracks. Late summer or early autumn is the window, the waterfalls are smaller, and it's warm enough for the seepage to kind of dry. I say kind of dry because out of the 8 times that I've climbed the wall, I've yet to have it dry the whole way up. It was raining when we were on the route and it had rained all the days before. I'm not sure what we even were doing here in the north wall. The weather can also still be slightly problematic and sometimes it can actually rain when it stays full sun on the forecast. Do you think you can climb that? The soloing potential is gone. By late autumn it's usually getting too late again. Long periods of rain can often soak the cliff and it never really dries out properly again before the winter hits. It is possible to climb in the off season, but often you'll have to climb on wet rock which is far from ideal for free soloing, hence why the season for a free solo ascent is actually very short. Unfortunately the day of the year that arrived for a free solo ascent didn't coincide with the travel restrictions and so Al couldn't be there. I made the solo ascent in August 2020, completely by myself with no camera crew, and in a way it was actually quite nice to do it like this. For me it made the whole thing a lot more real. There was no chance of bailing and it was full commitment from bottom to top with only my climbing ability to get me there and no cop out. On the actual day I filmed some piece to camera before setting off, in the middle of the wall and when I topped out, however with this we certainly didn't have any kind of film. The season for the cliff ended the day I made the solo, bad weather came in and the cliff was unclimbable for the rest of the year. Both myself and Al were still keen to try and create a film about the climb, however with continued problems with travel restrictions and now Al's appreciation of how tricky it was to get the cliff in good enough condition to pull off all aspects from his end, we hatched a new plan. The idea came to create a film different to any other climbing film out there. All the filming would be done in a POV style, a style which would take the viewer on a journey as if they were the climber, rather than watching the climber as an onlooker. It seemed like a bold idea to try and create a festival standard film without a single interview and only one camera, which would be attached to me in a fixed position. I wasn't quite sure how Al was going to do it, but that's when the rucksack, poles and GoPro idea started flying around. In simple terms the idea revolved around using GoPro 360 attached to a stick in a rucksack. The beauty of the GoPro 360 is that it can film all angles whilst being in a stationary position. You can look up, down, backwards, forwards and essentially 360 degrees around the whole shot. It captures everything. Al had the plan to cut and pan around the shots to show footwork, jams and the subtleties of climbing close up and in real time. I knew the idea had potential but I hadn't yet fathomed whether it would be possible to execute from a climbing perspective whilst free soloing 800m off the deck. Soloing with a backpack is ok but never feels totally comfortable, but soloing with a backpack and a camera on a stick coming out the side of it and then keeping this from hitting the rock and in a good position whilst you climb was never going to be that easy. A few weeks later Al was back in touch with a rather Heath Robinson looking design which had an upside down GoPro 360 attached to an adjustable arm sticking out the top of a rucksack. He sent some footage of himself soloing on the side of his house and assured me that actually the set up was Bob on. Al had made it look pretty simple on the side of his house but I knew right away climbing on the side of the house and free soloing an 800m wall in Norway are two entirely different things. In the meantime we'd since come to the conclusion that doing a whole film POV wasn't quite going to work and to show the scale of the cliff and the exposure of the climb we'd need some sort of drone footage. Even though we'd now moved to two cameras Al was still motivated to trial something different and keep interviews off the cards and create an immersive experience where the viewer could essentially experience the climb as I climbed it with no interruptions which was exactly how it was on the actual ascent. By the time everything was in place, the summer was cracking on a bit and we were closing in on the end of August, we were definitely cutting it fine with the whole process. We now just needed four things to line up to enable us to pull it off. The weather, the drone pilot, Mari's time off work and the GoPro arriving from England in time. Due to postal problems the GoPro and a bunch of extendable sticks only arrived in the post the day before heading off for the shoot so I had one evening to practice the set up before going and filming on an 800m big wall for a festival film. I got everything wrong on the first practice and had the stick out the pack too long which meant it was in shot. The problem now was time was up and I didn't have any more practice time so the evening before travelling down to Sharag I was on video call to Al stood in the living room with a gaffer tape pole sticking out the top of a rucksack trying to get the correct camera angle. It was also at this point I realised that the shoulder straps of the rucksack would be in the GoPro shot and also the camera rig would be in the drone shot both of which would have lowered the production quality. We hatched a plan that I would first put the pack and camera rig on then I would put my t-shirt over the top to cover the shoulder straps. On the day of the shoot I would re-climb some pitches twice, once with no GoPro rig at all this would mean that the drone shots were clean and showed no camera rig and then once with the camera rig on and the t-shirt over the top so the backpack straps couldn't be seen. At this point I feel like the filming and production plan had come together as best it could. The next conundrum was getting to the correct parts of the route, I'll be honest getting to the middle of an 800m wall twice in a day for two scenarios of filming is no mean feat but then getting to the middle of the wall twice and have the wall clean of ropes and other people is a bit bonkers. It all had to be done before 4pm whilst the wall was in the shade so both the drone shot and the GoPro shot had consistent light. As you'll now have probably come to realise pulling this shoot off with a director stuck in the UK, a drone pilot neither of us had met before and a GoPro rig that I'd climbed with him once wasn't going to be that easy. However having seen the film for the first time a few weeks ago I can safely say I believe we pulled it off and I think it is one of the most unique climbing films that has been made. I'm going to leave you with this clip of me at the top of pitch 18 messaging Al mid We're on it now, two pictures to go. Maybe you can put this in your film, this is documenting a documentary and you're directing from England whilst I am half way up a big wall with a camera stuck out the side of my freaking backpack. That was a bit of a classic. Anyway we've got an off width to go up there so smash on, we're smashing it. If you are interested in watching the 13 minute film of Sharag Solo it's part of this years Brit Rock film tour and all the information you need can be found in the video description.