Apetor's On Thin Ice: Tor Eckhoff's Norwegian Winter Films

Skating on thin ice, swimming and diving in freezing water, and hardly ever saying a word: these were the trademarks of the On Thin Ice films of Apetor, the YouTube name of Tor Eckhoff from Sandefjord, whose deadpan winter videos drew millions of viewers around the world.

Who was Apetor?

Tor Rathje Eckhoff was born on 22 November 1964 in Kristiansund and moved to Sandefjord, on Norway’s south-east coast, at the age of six. He studied history, philosophy and Nordic literature at the University of Bergen and later worked at a paint factory in Sandefjord. His screen name joins “ape” with Tor, a nod to his interest in how closely humans and apes are related.

He joined YouTube in October 2006, and his channel took off in 2011. Critics compared his silent, slapstick persona to Mr. Bean, and one described his editing as close to avant-garde cinema. His clips were picked up by TV 2 in Norway and by G4 and CBS in the United States.

The On Thin Ice films

The On Thin Ice series grew to 13 videos. The five collected here were filmed around Sandefjord and Andebu. The first, On thin sea ice 1, was shot in Sandefjord on 11 March 2010 and set to an instrumental cover of “Moonlight Shadow” by The Shadows. On Thin Sea Ice 2 passed a million views within a week in 2011 and was screened at the 2013 Banff Mountain Film Festival.

The films are more crafted than they look. Eckhoff shot them himself on a Canon Legria camcorder with a wide-angle converter, an external microphone, a tripod and a GoPro, and edited them in iMovie. Fixed camera positions, the crunch and creak of the ice, and the timing of each cut do much of the comic work. His other well-known series, the yearly First Snow videos, became even bigger: The First Snow 4 has passed 100 million views.