For one August weekend the wintering Antarctic community are
all doing the same thing, making films for the annual Antarctic Film Festival.
On Friday evening each base is emailed a list of five elements that have to be
included in the film, which these year were; the sound of a real sneeze, a
bathtub (problematic for us as we don’t have one), a gingerbread man, the
phrase “Voulez vous couche avec moi ce soir” and a ping pong ball. We were all
excited about making the film and came up with a general Star Wars theme, as we
had watched the films earlier in the winter. On Friday night the script was
written and we started getting the costumes together, as there are only four of
us on the island we each had to play a few different characters. Saturday was the filming day and we had one of
the most fun days we’ve had in the whole winter. A lot of time was spent
laughing at the bloopers and just the script in general, which we all thought
was pretty funny, but I’ll leave that up to you to judge! As we live on Bird
Island we decided we needed to get as many animal extras in as possible
including; Gentoo penguins (jabbas), a male fur seal as Chewbacca, some
Sheathbills, and a wandering albatross chick as the emperor (who put in a sterling
performance).
The general story of the film is that Han Solo, Leia and
Luke have headed to Bird Island to hide out after the destruction of the Death
Star in the first film or number four if you want to be pedantic. Unfortunately
Darth Vader finds them and heads to the island with a couple of Stormtroopers
to capture them. The goodies then have
to fight the baddies and try to escape.
If you are interested in seeing more then you can check the
film out on Youtube.
We completed filming on Saturday and spent Sunday editing
the film, and I made a little sequence with R2D2 and C3PO. By the end of Sunday
we were done and then had the task of attempting to upload our film on our
terrible internet connection. We managed to do it eventually by turning off any
other internet seeking equipment.
It was then time to vote. Slowly we downloaded videos from
the other bases and had an evening of watching them. We made our choices best
film, best acting, best screenplay, best use of elements, and best
cinematography and sent them off. We still haven’t had final confirmation of
the results but surprisingly for us Bird Island is doing pretty well being in
the top 3 for four categories. So fingers crossed I’ll be able to confirm the
results soon. Not bad for the smallest base in Antarctica.
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