Documentary Film With Canterbury Sequences

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30275, 30 October 1963, Page 13

Documentary Film With Canterbury Sequences

A British photographic team is visiting Canterbury to take a colour film of life on a sheep station, activity on Lyttelton's wharves, and aspects of business life in Christchurch. The film will be a half-hour documentary, with sequences shot in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Honolulu, and Canada—along the route of the new Commonwealth Pacific cable. The London company of Eyeline Films, Ltd., is making the film. Its director and production manager, Mr Stanley Wills, said last evening that the film would probably not be ready for screening in New Zealand for about a year. The film would portray, in the terms of people and their lives, the way the new cable linking the Commonwealth countries would be used. It would illustrate in picture and word how much easier the vastly improved communications would make business and life in widely dispersed points of the world. Mr Willis has as chief cameraman Mr P. Hennessy, who is assisted by Mr J. Alcott.

The precise time the film unit would spend in Canterbury, he said, would depend largely on the weather. If conditions were good, the filming in Canterbury would probably be done in four or five days. Mr Willis said that his team had already spent a fortnight on board the cablelaying ship Mercury, filming the linking of the new cable in mid-ocean, 600 miles this side of Honolulu. The filming of the shore station had been finished at Fiji. When the film unit left New Zealand it would take sequences in Australia and New Guinea before filming at various points in Canada. Mr Willis found the fort-

night on board the Mercury exciting. "It is not just a matter of paying out cable out of the back of a ship,” he said. “They work 24 hours a day, and it is quite a tense business. They have to watch the amount of slack very carefully, the amount of wind, and the exact course. It is quite complicated.” To gain “off-beat” shots of the cable-layers at work, Mr Willis took to one of the ship’s cutters. “I did not lose any photographic gear, but I caught plenty of spray blown up by. the wind,” he said. “It was riot smooth in a small boat in mid-ocean.”