Take a breathtaking quadcopter journey through ice caves

Piloting a GoPro-equipped quadcopter through ice caves has yielded an absolutely gorgeous tour of a phenomenon usually off-limits to human explorers.

Last week it was a volcano, this week it's an ice cave. Quadcopters, it would seem, are versatile machines indeed.

This particular DJI Phantom was piloted into ice caves in Alaska by filmmaking team Firefight Films as part of DSLR Pros' Bigger than Life series. While — unlike active volcano craters — humans can scale ice caves, it's a dangerous activity, and some regions are very difficult to reach.

The quadcopter was equipped with a GoPro Hero3+, attached with a DJI Zenmuse H3-2D gimbal, which captured all of the footage, and piloted by Firefight's Christopher Carson in what the team calls "the first documented drone flight through ice caves". All footage was shot at 1080p and 60fps.

"We didn't use Protune," the team wrote. "We edited and colour graded everything in Adobe Premiere. We used no Ribcages or RageCams. It really came down to the pilot filming as smoothly as possible, editing and colour grading in post to bring everything together."

For an Australian, the resultant footage seems particularly magical, a frozen wonderland — an impression only compounded by the fascinating behind-the-scenes video.

Via vimeo.com