Camera trips to the ends of the earth

Press, 26 February 1977, Page 13

Camera trips to the ends of the earth

To a former Christchurch man, Kelly Duncan, film director and cameraman, who has worked in Canada for 22 years, making television commercials is an important part of a challenging job which takes him to the four corners of the earth. Commercials might be regarded as those mindless, obtrusive interrupters of good programmes, but in Kelly’s eyes they are industrial promotion films serving to hone his filmmaking talents to a fine edge. He has shot film tor these in locations as various as Alaska and the Sahara Desert. As film director and cinematographer for Canawest Film Productions, Vancouver, Kelly Duncan made a commercial about a driver faced with a drunken driving charge. It was a re-enactment of the whole incident — the stopping on the highway, the man’s interrogation, test for alcohol, court appearance, jail sentence and loss of driving licence.

For this public service advertisement, Kelly was awarded the industry’s Golden Bessy for the best Canadian TV commercial in a two-year period.

The budget for a 60-sec-ond commercial can be anything from $3OOO to $30,000. Jt was considerably more for a sales promotion documentary, “Under the Polar Star.’’ filmed over an 18-month period in temperatures sometimes 70deg below zero, about the building of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

“The film snows the immensity of the project, the nature of the mountains, streams, canyons, forest and Arctic ‘desert*

througfh which the 800mile pipe-line passes,” savs Kellv.

The budget for this film, made for MorrisonKnudsen Company, of Boise. Idaho — a worldwide engineering and construction company — was $BO,OOO.

Although the film will be used primarily as a sales tool in countries planning new pipelines, it has already been screened four times as a document-

ary on American television. it details environmental controls. It notes, for example, that in earth-quake-prone areas, the huge pipe is mounted on rockers to prevent warping. And where the pipeline crosses established game trails the pipe is either buried or raised high enough to permit migrating herds to cross. The film pictures caribou migrating across the vast northern desert apparently undisturbed by man’s presence. Kelly Duncan tells of temperatures in which film became so brittle it broke, and lenses could not be focussed. And days became as short as two hours of light. After leaving his photographer’s job in Christchurch in 1955 Kelly worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for 11 years.

Then came three years in Toronto making commercials and sales documentaries. He was awarded a Canada Council grant, one of many made to the performing arts.

Earlier he studied Japanese language for two years and spent a year in Japan studying featurefilm making, especially special effects photography. It was logical, therefore, that Kelly, who keeps a suitcase ready packed, should go to Japan to make, for Canawest, a film commissioned by the Council of Forest Industries of British Columbia.

Called, “Tn Which We Dwell,” the 30-minute documentary featured a Japanese-style housed constructed in Canada and outlined the possibilties for Canadian materials and technology in Japan. The film was awarded a Special Jury Award of Excellence at the Canadian Film and Television Association’s 1976 film awards.

“We tried to capture the unlikely marriage of nature, tradition and technology, with specific regard to house-building methods,” Kelly says. He is making two more trips to Japan this year to make another film showing people living in the Canadian-material houses.

The Council of Forest Industries has also commissioned film coverage of houses constructed of Canadian timber and using Canadian building methods in Europe. Again the approach will be low-key, and Kelly will film families living in spe» cially constructed houses in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy.

Every now and again, Kelly is involved in directing and shooting a feature film —- something he relishes and which, he. says, his company would not be able to undertake were it not for a staple production diet of commercials and sales documentaries.

Three years ago, Kelly Duncan was in Algeria making a film in the Sahara Desert based on an irrigation project which aimed to make crops grow on barren land.

He was last year in central Africa making a film on a hydra-electricity project, and plans to make another four return trips to complete the documentary.

The list of films Kelly Duncan has worked on is as long as the list of locations in countries round the world he constantly visits. In a recent period of seven years he filmed more than SSM worth of television commercials.

Kelly Duncan, who was in Christchurch last week visiting his mother, Mrs A. M. Duncan, Charles Street, describes himself as much a business man as a creator.

“It is all very well to tell clients that you are a film-maker and can work only when the spirit moves, as some do,” he says.

“But woe betide the film-maker working to demanding deadlines who is over the budget, misses the on-air date, or who is told by the client that what he has produced is not is what is wanted,” he says.

Like any job with ex* acting requirements, Kelly’s role requires strict discipline — he organises travel, shooting of film, engagement of actors and all the other details of-film-making.

KEN COATES talks to KELLY DUNCAN, formerly of Christchurch, about his work as an international cameraman. The places for his filming have ranged from Alaska (above) to the Sahara Desert.