In May 2008, 24-year-old Jeff Orlowski-Yang disembarked from a helicopter on the stony tundra of western Greenland, then watched it fly away. He had one month until it would come back.
The novice documentarian had been dropped off alongside engineer and scientist Adam LeWinter with a few tents, a month’s worth of food, and hundreds of pounds of camera equipment to try to witness one of nature’s most elusive shows. The pair set up camp and carefully positioned five cameras. They recorded 24/7, sleeping in shifts, focusing first on one glacier, then relocating to another, hoping to catch ice at the front edge breaking off, a process known as calving. On day 18, with all cameras aimed at the Ilulissat Glacier, a low rumble broke through the wind. “It’s starting, Adam, I think,” Orlowski-Yang said, as one massive slab began to separate from the rest of the glacier. “Holy shit, look at that big berg rolling,” LeWinter said. “Look at the whole thing!”
PICTURE THIS: Orlowski-Yang in high school, shooting a selfie. As editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, he oversaw the creation of a 9/11 commemorative issue. (Photo: Jeff Orlowski-Yang)
The entire three-mile face of the glacier was fracturing. For 75 minutes, Ilulissat’s facade—more than twice the height of the Empire State Building—crumbled off in what still holds the Guinness World Records for both the largest and the longest glacier calving event ever caught on film. In all, 7.4 cubic kilometers fell into the sea, and the glacier retreated by a mile.
Orlowski-Yang, ’06, combined the record-setting footage with five years of additional filming to direct his first feature documentary, Chasing Ice. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, played in theaters for 27 weeks, and reached 15 million broadcast viewers. Orlowski-Yang followed that with two more critically acclaimed documentaries: Chasing Coral in 2017, which used underwater time lapses and videos to chronicle one of the most severe coral bleaching events in recorded history; and The Social Dilemma in 2020, which exposed the deep regret and concern of some of social media’s major architects. All three films won Emmy awards, and Chasing Ice was nominated for an Oscar, for best original song.
Orlowski-Yang was drawn to documentaries because of their power to captivate. “It’s one of the last mediums people will sit down and consume in long-form,” he says. “Somebody will go and see a film for an hour and a half and leave the theater oftentimes transformed.” And the audience is growing. The number of annual documentary theatrical releases has more than tripled since 2000, and it’s the most in-demand type of unscripted content on streaming services, outpacing genres like reality TV and talk shows. More than 100 million people had watched The Social Dilemma within a year of its premiere.
Orlowski-Yang’s newest film, a mini-documentary called Chasing Time, caps the first chapter of his career with a return to the glaciers—and people—that have shaped him. Its time lapses span 1.5 million photos and 15 years, offering the only opportunity to see the complete range of footage from the original film’s now-decommissioned cameras. A 30-minute version premiered on PBS in November, and the full 40-minute director’s cut will be available for free on ChasingTime.com beginning March 21, World Glacier Day.
EXTREME FOCUS: For The Social Dilemma, Orlowski-Yang, with headphones, Rhodes, center, and the rest of the Exposure Labs team interviewed 21 tech experts, including eight alums. (Photo: Rafael Reyes/Courtesy The Social Dilemma)
“I don’t think Jeff necessarily set out to found a production company to make millions of movies,” says Larissa Rhodes, a producer and co-founder at Orlowski-Yang’s studio, Exposure Labs. “I think it was really, truly: How do I use film to show people what I’m witnessing in the world? And then how do we share that in a way that is compelling and moves people to want to do something?”
The First Big Story
When Orlowski-Yang was a senior at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, he was witnessing the world as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, the Spectator. One morning, during his first-period music class, he heard what sounded like giant truck doors slamming shut just outside. It was 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001.
His father, John Orlowski, was watching the news from their Staten Island home and immediately worried for his son. Stuyvesant was four blocks away from the Twin Towers, but it wasn’t the school’s proximity that concerned him. “My fear was that he was going to take his camera and run toward the buildings and start documenting,” John says.
Orlowski-Yang began taking pictures as a 9- or 10-year-old, when his father set up a darkroom in the basement. He’d spend hours there, the Beatles or Jimmy Hendrix blasting in the background, as images appeared on photo paper as if by magic. “You were using your hands to literally paint with light,” Orlowski-Yang says. His father, a high school social studies teacher, remembers Orlowski-Yang being particularly inspired by one image: “Tank Man,” the famous 1989 photo from Tiananmen Square that showed a man standing alone, facing down a line of military tanks. “He said when he saw that photograph, it clicked in him: the power of photography,” John says.
As the Twin Towers were collapsing, Orlowski-Yang dispatched the Spectator’s photographer and writers, intent on covering whatever was happening. In the weeks that followed, he led the creation of a 24-page commemorative issue with photos and reporting by students. When he saw the final product, he thought it warranted wider readership. His parents still aren’t sure how he did it, but Orlowski-Yang found a paper supply company and a printer, got in touch with the New York Times, and persuaded them to include the edition as an insert. On November 20, 2001, 830,000 copies of the Spectator were distributed to subscribers in the New York metro area.
Meeting A Mentor
By the time Orlowski-Yang entered Stanford, he was set on becoming a photojournalist—a neutral observer creating a record of important events. He took every photography course he could and got a job scanning photographs for professors.
But at a photo exhibition on campus, his plans faltered. As he stood alone, taking his time to consider one of the photos and read its caption, he saw a group of three students walk in, look around for a moment, and leave. They hadn’t looked at any photo for more than a few seconds. “I just was like: Shit,” he says. “I felt so bad for the photographer whose work was on display, and I was worried that my photography wouldn’t have an impact in the world if people weren’t going to pay attention to it like that.”
He related the story to his good friend and housemate Jack Conte, ’06, who saw an opening. Conte, who made short films with friends as a member of the Stanford Film Society (SFS), had long been trying to persuade Orlowski-Yang to deploy his camera skills on the group’s behalf. Armed with SFS’s professional-style Panasonic DVX100 camera, Orlowski-Yang began to shoot short movies about an old Polaroid camera that trapped people in its film, or about a coin-operated human. “Here was a completely new take on the medium,” he says. “I just utterly fell in love with it.”
His schedule was perpetually packed—singing with the Talisman a cappella group or helping with photography shoots on campus—but filmmaking, both in and beyond SFS, began to take over, especially after a mutual friend connected Orlowski-Yang with renowned environmental photographer James Balog.
It was 2007, Orlowski-Yang’s senior year, and Balog had recently founded the Extreme Ice Survey, a project for which he’d install 28 cameras at 21 glaciers around the world and stitch together time lapses of any change. Balog invited Orlowski-Yang to accompany him (for one week and no pay) if Orlowski-Yang could be his jack-of-all trades assistant and novice cinematographer, documenting the process of setting up the project’s first time-lapse camera, at the Sólheimajökull Glacier in Iceland.
“It was the dream job,” says Orlowski-Yang. It was also far outside of his comfort zone, which seems to be one of his favorite places. “If you stumbled out at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom, you’d find him testing his snowshoes in the hallway,” remembers Conte, now the founder and CEO of Patreon.
The tendency was hardwired. As a kid, when Orlowski-Yang first got a mountain bike, he went outside, sat on the bike without moving, and let it tilt until he fell to the ground, over and over again. He’d read an article about safe falling technique, and he wanted to practice falling properly. “He’s not just an adventure risk-taker. He’s hyper-strategic about what he does,” Rhodes says.
In Iceland, Orlowski-Yang filmed Balog and his small team as they climbed up ice and huddled against wind carrying two-by-fours, power tools, and a wooden mounting bracket. He assisted as they bolted the camera to the lip of a cliff so it faced the Sólheimajökull Glacier. What he lacked in experience he made up for through his fascination with studying camera manuals and a plan B, C, and D for every setback. “He’s kind of a mix of a Boy Scout and MacGyver,” says Svavar Jónatansson, Balog’s field assistant and the team’s native Icelander.
After graduating from Stanford, Orlowski-Yang continued to work with Balog as a cinematographer and assistant, eventually moving to Boulder, Colo., where Balog lived, and following him around the world to install additional cameras and absorb his outlook on life. “In working with James, yes, he was a photojournalist, but he was really an artist with a message,” Orlowski-Yang says. “One of the biggest things that I learned from him was just the reality that I did have my own voice.” Orlowski-Yang earned money by making marketing videos and sizzle reels for the tech start-ups of his friends from Stanford. Then he’d be off, to Montana, or Alaska, or Greenland, riding sled dogs to a remote site to replace a timer, or being dropped off by helicopter to nab Guinness World Records.
“I was totally hooked,” he says. “Totally friggin’ loved it.”
The Green Light
Though Balog wasn’t sure the Extreme Ice Survey team would capture anything worthwhile, the footage they retrieved over the next year revealed that a glacial pace was, in fact, rapid, with glaciers responding to weather and the temperature of the ocean by receding in weeks, days, and even hours rather than years. As Balog presented the photos in lectures around the country to wide-eyed audiences, it became clear that the project was more than a print spread in a magazine. In 2007, Balog pitched a documentary to National Geographic’s TV division.
Orlowski-Yang was adamant he could direct it, but Balog initially hired industry veterans to lead the film. “I just thought he was too green,” Balog says. However, after just a few months, when Balog fired the veterans for blowing through one too many deadlines, Orlowski-Yang asked him if he could do it on spec. “Let me take the footage home for the weekend,” Balog remembers him saying. “Let me cut a trailer for you and show you what I can do.”
TROPHY TIME: Balog and Orlowski-Yang began collaborating in 2007, when Orlowski-Yang joined Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey team. The first film drawing from that footage, Chasing Ice, won an Emmy for Outstanding Nature Programming in 2014. (Photo: Exposure Labs)
For Orlowski-Yang, the story was not just one of climate change. It was the story of Balog—a man who’d devoted his entire life to his art, whose kneecaps were ragged from four decades of mountaineering, who was now, in his late 50s, pouring his soul into a project he hoped could leave a lasting impact on the world his children were growing up in. “I feel like my life has purpose in doing this,” Balog says straight to the camera in the film. “It’s what I was put here to do.”
Back in the office on Monday morning, Balog sat with his wife and a longtime office manager to watch the five-minute trailer Orlowski-Yang had made in less than 72 hours. “We were in tears,” Balog says, his voice catching. “Still brings me to tears right now, thinking about it.” The trailer was thoughtful and sensitive, Balog says, and Orlowski-Yang had a good sense of where the grandeur and the punch of the story would be.
He gave Orlowski-Yang the green light.
Chasing Dilemmas
It took five years, numerous complete remakes, and the hiring of experienced editors and producers, but in 2012, Chasing Ice premiered at dozens of film festivals and established a filmmaking signature for Orlowski-Yang and his new production company: The topics are heavy, and the research is rigorous, but the stories are simple.
“The big-idea films can sometimes just leave people cold,” says Basil Tsiokos, ’95, one of the senior programmers at the Sundance Institute, who selects films that will screen at the festival. One thing Orlowski-Yang does well, he says, is find a way to tell a smaller story, typically through an empathetic focal character like Balog. “He’s able to take this thing that could scare an audience—like, I don’t want to watch anything about climate change—and find a way to get them to care and to focus for that 90 minutes.”
‘He’s able to take this thing that could scare an audience and find a way to get them to care and to focus for that 90 minutes.’
That was especially true in Orlowski-Yang’s second feature film, Chasing Coral. The Exposure Labs team spent 3 1/2 years filming the death of coral reefs in warming waters—a process known as bleaching. Though the movie is known for its eerie time-lapse footage of bustling coral communities turned to vacant oceanic graveyards, the journey of a young coral aficionado, Zackery Rago, is the soul of the story. When Orlowski-Yang met him, Rago was a recent college graduate working with an underwater camera equipment manufacturer. “I was, at that point, never even supposed to be on camera,” Rago says. But as the film progressed, Rago’s love for coral reefs and the emotional toll he described as he dove down every day to film the dying colonies became the heartbeat of the film.
“It’s not a science-first film,” Orlowski-Yang told Denver’s Westword magazine when the documentary premiered in 2017. “We’re trying to keep the human story, the thread that gets people engaged, and the science is as little as you need to know to understand what’s going on.”
To find a human story in his third feature documentary, The Social Dilemma, Orlowski-Yang spearheaded an unconventional approach. The heft of the film came from interviews with 21 tech experts and executives (including eight alumni) sounding the alarm on their own work, explaining how the software they’d programmed to, for example, spread positivity (e.g., the Facebook “like” button) had been co-opted to exploit human attention. But the interviews were interspersed with scripted narrative scenes—the smaller story—of a family struggling against addiction to increasingly radical, one-sided social media content.
“Its value lies in pulling together some alarming if abstract concepts into a genuinely scary whole,” reads the Wall Street Journal review of the film. Though critics questioned the impact of the scripted scenes, audiences were rapt. Within four weeks of the film’s premiere on Netflix in September of 2020, 38 million people had watched it, and it became a most-watched film on the streaming service that year. In those same four weeks, the U.S. government subpoenaed chief executives at Google, Twitter, and Facebook to appear before Congress, and Facebook took the unprecedented step of issuing a 1,387-word public rebuttal to the film.
A Glacial Pace
Orlowski-Yang’s aspirations were small when he began working on Chasing Time in 2021. “The thought was: We’ll just make a YouTube update. It’ll only be, like, three to five minutes,” says Sarah Keo, the film’s co-director.
The update would feature Balog, Orlowski-Yang, and Jónatansson decommissioning the sole Extreme Ice Survey camera still in operation—the first camera they’d ever installed, at the Sólheimajökull Glacier in Iceland. “I’ve been dreading taking down this camera,” Balog says in the film. After 15 years, Balog was bidding a reluctant goodbye to the project that had filled him with purpose for nearly a third of his life. He’d had four knee surgeries, a hip replacement, and, most notably, a blood cancer diagnosis. (“I’ve never had that phone call from anybody,” Orlowski-Yang says in the film. “What do you do?”)
Chasing Time is as much about the mortality of people as it is about the mortality of glaciers. Telling that story, he and Keo decided, wouldn’t fit in a three-minute YouTube clip.
“I don’t think he ever set out to be my mentor,” Orlowski-Yang says in the film. “He sees the world through such a powerful lens—literal, figurative—and he had something he needed to say artistically.” It took years of looking at Balog through lenses, sitting next to him on helicopters, and being at the other end of his climbing ropes for Orlowski-Yang to internalize that conviction and realize that he, too, had something to say.
A lot to say, in fact. He and the Exposure Labs team are currently at work on five new feature-length films. They will be different from the Chasing films and The Social Dilemma. “The stories that we need now are of a completely different flavor,” Orlowski-Yang says. Though he’s reluctant to dig into specifics, he says that while the earlier films tried to illuminate problems, his upcoming films will focus more on solutions and frameworks aimed at repairing the rifts between humans and the world around them, especially the natural world.
The films are Orlowski-Yang’s way of saying something artistically. They’re his way of making an impact that will outlive him. And they are, in a sense, his way of answering a question he asks in Chasing Time: “How do you say thank you to somebody who’s changed your life? How do you say thank you to a mentor?”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
