Call Of The White Documentary

2 November in News

Back in early 2009 Polar explorer Felicity Aston set about organising an expedition to the South Pole. The expedition involved a team of 8 women from Brunei Darussalam, Cyprus, Ghana, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK skiing 900km across Antarctica to the South Pole despite the fact that some members of the team had never seen snow before, experienced subzero temperatures or slept in a tent.

24-hour daylight

Felicity asked Snowline to produce a documentary film about the project and the expedition. We were selected based on our experience of cold and extreme conditions, working on projects such as The Catlin Arctic Survey and for 'outdoor' clients like Rab and Cotswold Outdoor. Snowline produced, directed, filmed sections and edited the 45min documentary: 'Call of the White'.

Inside the tents

On December 29th 2009 Felicity Aston and her team reached the South Pole. Shortly after we took delivery of all the footage that the team had shot themselves and together with the material we had shot, we began producing the film. With over 3,500 individual clips captured, some over 45mins in length, amounting to hours and hours of footage (we tried counting but gave up) occupying over 3TB of hard drive space. It was a mammoth project and one we passionately wanted to produce something special from.

At the South Pole

Elliott undertook the whole production and editing of the project, which took several months, most of which was going through all the rushes for the project. In early 2011 Felicity wrote the voiceover script and work began on composing the music for the film. One of biggest challenges Elliott faced when editing the film was the ending, very little footage was shot of the team arriving at the pole (as of course they were all too excited about actually arriving at the pole!), a great deal of thought and experimenting with different endings finally came in May 2010, when 'Call of the White' was finally finished. The voiceover for the film was done by Phil Hayward, the music was composed by Chris Harper and the colour grading by Valentina Riva.

P1000367