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By Peter Rejcek
The short film opens with the moon streaking behind the
dome-shaped top of Mount Discovery, as twilight briefly
splashes red on the face of the volcanic cone. In the
subsequent scene, the moon appears again, dramatically
flying past a wooden cross on Observation Hill overlooking
McMurdo Station.
Next, come the auroras: shimmering green sheets of light,
soft and ephemeral, then almost solid and powerful, curtains
billowing in a cosmic wind. Violin music plays softly,
achingly, and then suddenly an entire orchestra rushes
in as the southern lights blaze across the night sky in
a quick succession of scenes.
The clip, not even two minutes long, perhaps says more
about the mystery and awe that Antarctica inspires than
just about any feature length film. Just think what photographer
Anthony Powell can do with 70 minutes of time-lapse footage
as he tells the story of a year living on the Ice.
“A lot of [my work is] just trying to convey the
feeling of the place. Regular photos and videos quite
often just don’t do it justice,” Powell says
in a soft New Zealand accent. “When I saw what was
possible with the time lapse, I felt like it captured
the essence of it a lot better. A lot of people have commented
to me that it’s the only thing they’ve seen
that conveys the feeling of [Antarctica] as they see it.”
Powell’s normal day job — well, night job —
is as a satellite communications engineer at McMurdo Station.
He’s on his sixth straight austral winter, monitoring
and maintaining the satellite equipment that keeps McMurdo
connected to the rest of the world. But he recently completed
a short summer stint on the Ice — as a photographer
under the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic
Artists and Writers Program.
The program sponsors six or more artists, writers, photographers,
painters and other über-creative types each year
to produce work about the Antarctic. The grant doesn’t
come with any money, but provides access to many of the
same areas visited by scientists in the U.S. Antarctic
Program.
Powell says the program gave him the freedom to go where
he needed for his film project, which he took up in 2003.
Previously, he only worked on the time-lapse photography
during free time from his six-day-a-week job. And, just
as important, it allowed him to work on his own time schedule,
often late into the night to capture the soft light of
the midnight sun.
“It’s the main thrust for why I wanted to come
down during that time of the year, so I could round out
the full year of footage, so I can present what it’s
like for a full year on the Ice,” he says. “The
few weeks I was down here for the summer I gathered as
much footage as I had in the previous two winters.”
Powell creates the time-lapse films by taking individual
still photos on a digital SLR camera, then converting
each individual photo into one frame of film or video.
At 24 frames per second, it soon adds up, he says, estimating
he’s shot more than “one million individual
photos, filled up several hard drives, worn out a number
of cameras, and broken quite a bit of other camera equipment
in the process.”
He uses an external timer to take a photo every second,
or perhaps once every couple of minutes, depending on
the type of effect he wants to create. A modified tripod
also provides motion, if Powell, say, wants to create
a 360-degree view of the sun as it circles the horizon.
The effect can seem frenzied, when watching something like
tractors preparing an airfield landing strip or snow road,
zipping across the screen, spitting out a constant stream
of snow like a lawnmower cutting grass at high speed. Or
surreal, as the snow trapping a heavy chain quickly melts
in Powell’s digitized time warp; the chain appears
to collapse like a slinky dropping down a stairway.
Powell’s wife, Christine, assisted him with the
summer project, including shooting video and maintaining
a blog of their day-to-day work. An American who has worked
in the U.S. Antarctic Program since 1997, Christine Powell
says photography is her husband’s passion.
“Speeding it up from a photograph and slowing it
down from a video, somewhere in the middle, somehow it
captures a bit of magic,” says Christine Powell,
who has wintered at McMurdo Station seven times, including
five in a row. “I’m not sure what that [magic]
is, but it allows you to see patterns of things that you
wouldn’t normally see, because we only see things
in real time.
“There’s a lot of stuff going on down [in Antarctica],
but it’s happening slowly,” she adds. “The
time lapse really helps you see what’s going on —
the changing of the clouds, the patterns, and the light
and the dark.”
Music is a key element in the time-lapse films, seeming
to set the tempo of the motion that Powell captures. For
the feature film he envisions, Powell has enlisted the
help of Wellington, N.Z.-based Plan 9 Music, a group of
composers and long-time musicians who have worked on a
number of TV and film projects. Plan 9 is best known for
its work on director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the
Rings movies.
“They’re really excited about the project,”
Anthony Powell says. This will be the first time he will
have music specifically written for his footage, which
has him excited as well. “Now, instead of making
the clips fit the music, it’ll be more the music
will be made to fit the clips, so it will free me up more
in what I can do in that respect,” he says.
David Donaldson, one of the composers for Plan 9, explains
he came across some of Powell’s clips on the video-sharing
Web site YouTube™, and was immediately fascinated
by what he saw.
“One of the appeals of Anthony’s stuff is that
a lot of it’s going to be visual images and music.
That’s a lot of scope with what you can do with that,”
Donaldson says by phone from his Wellington studio. “The
footage is absolutely incredible. As soon as we saw it
we said, ‘We’re in. We’re definitely in.’
That footage that he’s got, there are not many people
who could even come close to making that.”
Those five weeks in the summer took the Powells to the
South Pole, Lake Vanda in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and
penguin colonies around Ross Island. Powell often had
four sets of cameras working simultaneously, usually to
capture very different scenes, which could last up to
48 hours or longer.
For the footage at South Pole, Powell modified an ice
cooler to help keep the cameras warm, as even summer time
temperatures are 50 degrees or more below freezing. He
cut a hole in a cooler and attached a security camera
dome to the outside. He then put a heating element and
camera mount inside the box, powering the whole thing
with a car battery.
“Cameras seem to work okay down to around about
minus 20 as long as you’ve got a good power supply,
but once you get much below that the mechanisms start
to freeze up, so you need to provide some insulation and
heating,” Powell explains.
The goal this winter is to process and edit the summer
footage in his spare time, as well as re-render all of
the original raw photos from the last five years into
high-definition. Of course, Powell will find time to add
to his vast database of photos.
“I can already think of some shots that I don’t
have that I need to get,” he says. “When you
spend a little bit of time in a place and just sort of
observe the environment for a while, you’ll start
to recognize the changes and find other things to concentrate
on.”
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