Elizabeth White, 33, is a director of hit BBC nature series Frozen Planet. She lives in Cliftonwood, Bristol, with two housemates

Throwing open the curtains of my Bristol bedroom to a view of the docks and rows of brightly coloured terrace houses is very different to filming Frozen Planet where I was surrounded by ice and sea for six weeks.

As is my morning routine – at home I’ll wake up at 7am and head to the local outdoor lido. It’s beautiful, especially in the winter when the pool is warmer than the air so it steams. I have to be brave to face the freezing cold air but it’s not as bad as diving under the ice in Russia, where it was so cold that I worried that if my oxygen regulator was knocked out, I wouldn’t be able to find my mouth again as I had no sense of touch. After swimming I have a hot shower – a luxury that I only had once every two weeks while on location – and get dressed for work in skinny jeans and boots. Breakfast is granola and fruit before I walk five minutes to my office at the BBC.

Frozen Planet has consumed the last four years of my life. Most of the locations we filmed in are incredibly remote and there are no ambulances, so we had medical and avalanche training and learnt to use rifles and set trip wires to deal with polar bears.

The next two years were an intense period of filming – organising the logistics of getting to the Arctic, Antarctica or other remote locations, staying out in the field for weeks, coming back to plan the next trip and then heading out to another location.

As director it was my job to make sure we got the right footage – pans of the scenery or shots of ice formations or killer whales hunting seals – so I drew storyboards to communicate with the cameramen. I was often working with people with years of experience and as the youngest and only female member of the team it was challenging to remain in control.

Elizabeth White: Director, Frozen Planet