Film director Jeff Orlowski has won the Audience Award at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival in March for his debut feature, "Chasing Ice," following the work of National Geographic photographer James Balog and his multi-year photography project to capture the earth's changing ecosystem.

The film — which debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival and is scheduled to screen at the Seattle International Film Festival in May—uses many of Balog's still images and time-lapse videos of vanishing glaciers across the Arctic.

A 27-year-old Stanford University graduate, Orlowski has already traveled to some of the world's most remote locations for his work, including Iceland, Greenland, the Alps, Bolivia, Alaska and Glacier National Park.