THIS IS HOW A SUPER-8 DOCUMENTARY IS MADE: "PERFECT ANTARCTIC MADNESS"

While many digital projects belonging to the fashionable subsidy-driven audiovisual world are promoted with great fanfare — financed by generous public grants extracted from the sweat of taxpayers and distributed by committees populated by the usual ideological gatekeepers — some of us, working with genuine film and craft, move forward in a much quieter way: frame by frame.

Alan and Chloe

In this short recording, captured simply with a mobile phone, you can see one of those everyday moments of my work: I´m checking, through a low-resolution telecine, a sequence already edited from Perfect Antarctic Madness, a documentary filmed entirely on Super-8 film that was manually transferred into Single-8 cartridges in order to be shot with my half-century-old Fujica ZC1000.

In the sequence, filmed on the bridge of the ship, we see the officer Eline, while Chloe speaks with Allan White, and Vide and Michael scan the horizon as enormous waves roll past the vessel during a violent storm in the Southern Ocean.

Bridge official Eline looking for a enormeous iceberg

The anemometer had already exceeded 100 knots of wind, which is the maximum it can measure, when a gigantic wave suddenly crashes against the bridge windows with tremendous force.

At this latitude — 77° South — the roaring, howling and bellowing winds that we left behind days earlier in more “human” latitudes, which many sailors consider fearsome storms, are remembered by us almost as gentle breezes.

Vide, from the Arctic, in the Antarctic!

Everything was registred — one might say notarized — on Super-8 film, without artificial intelligence, algorithms, or digital trickery.

And that, friends, is how this project progresses: at my own pace, calmly, without haste, and without depending on public subsidies or the fashions of the publicly funded audiovisual world.

When one works in complete independence, there is no other way: patience, perseverance, and the conviction that, week after week, little by little, Perfect Antarctic Madness continues to take shape.