There’s nothing new in the man vs. nature genre, with movies like Cast Away and Alive and TV shows like Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers giving thrill-seeking audiences a comfortable living room perch from which to watch people struggling for survival in the harsh wilds.

But Brett Rogers faced two challenges when completing the 7 Days in Hell pilot for History Canada: shooting everything himself without a crew and completing his mission of wilderness survival.

“The hard part, if I was to break it down, is 80% of the work was filmmaking and 20% was surviving,” Rogers told Playback as his pilot episode from Proper Television set to debut on History on Dec. 18.

7 Days in Hell drops Rogers and co-host Cliff Quinn into historic worst-case scenarios they must overcome and survive with only period equipment and whatever camera equipment they can carry.

The pilot episode has the duo in the Yukon around 1885 to survive a week of living and traveling as gold rush prospectors did on dangerous expeditions.

Of course, unlike Survivorman’s Les Stroud, who mentored Rogers, he has a companion in Quinn as both get beat up physically and mentally on their wilderness adventure.

Even so, each man had to lug their own camera gear in remote locations, and trust they were getting the right camera shots and enough of them to make Proper Television and History happy.

“It was go-go-go. You didn’t have time if you were cold or wet or hungry. You constantly had to think of everything we did as a sequence and to complete that sequence,” Rogers recalled.

So moments as simple as waking up in the morning or going to bed at night had to be rigorously planned shot-wise before the seven-day shoot, and executed on the spot by rising extra early or staying up later to set up and take down cameras.

“It was overwhelming. Many times, in my mind, I thought we were screwing up and not getting it and doubting everything,” Rogers said.

Despite the odds, the solo shooters persevered with cameras mounted on their bodies, held in their hands or positioned along their trail.

“You have to shoot everything you do and talk to the camera and explain what’s going on and gets your tights, wides and mediums,” Rogers added.

For much of the pilot episode, Rogers and Quinn travel along river edges to make the most progress on route.

So another challenge was ensuring the TV audience fully grasps just how cold and wet and hungry they were, not least to raise the drama stakes and defy audience disbelief that they were truly alone and without a camera crew.

After all, Rogers and Quinn are attempting to re-create the dangers of edge-of-earth exploration normally associated with discoverers of the Northwest Passage or Mount Everest climbers well before modern-day inventions like GPS devices and freeze dried food.

So the duo only carried one full day of food, requiring them to hunt along the way – at one point for squirrels – and only had one blanket each to keep them warm at night.

“We had to put ourselves in a situation in which we knew we would suffer and the experience would be legit,” Rogers insisted.

Only in that way could they have the chance for their coldness, hunger and utter fatigue to be fully captured by the cameras on their faces, and not always conveyed with needless dialogue.

A possible series order for 7 Days in Hell will see Rogers and Quinn dropped into other historic scenarios and rugged geographies in Canada and the U.S.

That includes the duo recreating life as cod fishermen shipwrecked off the coast of Newfoundland, or Civil War deserters hiding in the swamps of Mississippi.