It's that time of year again where citizens across the Antarctic continent dust off their camera equipment, don their fake moustaches and start practicing their comedy foreign accents for the 5th Annual Antarctic 48-hour Film Festival!
Avid readers may remember this event from last year. It is an annual competition open to any bases in Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic that wish to participate, where the challenge is to produce a short film over the course of a single weekend. On Friday evening a list of five elements which must be included in the film are sent out via e-mail, and then each base has 48 hours to write, shoot and edit together a film of about 5 minutes, to be submitted to the competition the following Monday. Each base then watches all the films that have been submitted and votes for their favourite in each of five categories - Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Acting and Best Use of the Elements. The winners of each category receives the glory of victory plus a chance to choose one of the elements for next year's competition.
The films that are produced are always endearingly amateurish and often hilarious (sometimes unintentionally), but made with such enthusiasm and ingenuity that you can't help but love them. Last year Bird Island won exactly no prizes in the competition, but we have high hopes this year with our masterpiece 'Quantum of Cybermice'. You can view it on YouTube by following the link below. I won't go into any detail about the plot, but suffice to say that it has everything a good movie should have - explosions, extraordinary acting, graphic scenes of violence, an albatross, more explosions and a man in a dress. Enjoy.
The five required elements were:
Character: a queen.
Sound: breaking ice.
Line: "I'll save you".
Object: a computer mouse.
Object: a map of your station or local area.
watch 'Quantum of Cybermice'
