Ghosts of Antarctica

2021
UHD 4k , Stereo. Duration: 8:10

Ghosts of Antarctica is a reflective short film that brings new life and emotion to the faces of Australian Antarctic scientists and explorers of the Heroic Era in the early Twentieth century. An homage to the remarkable work of pioneering Australian cinematographer, Frank Hurley (1885-1962), Ghosts of Antarctica uses artificial intelligence and deep learning approaches to colorize and animate images from 100-year-old glass-plate photographs and film footage taken by Hurley and others during the 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

Ghosts of Antarctica is experimental documentary cinema, where collaboration and dialogue between the director and the serendipity of semi-autonomous machine learning approaches creates surprising new insights into the humanity of these early pioneers. They are no longer fixed as timeworn black and white images of long-dead half-forgotten heroes, but living, breathing portraits of individuals, replete with the humor, fascination, tragedy and flaws of us all.
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For more information: petermorse.com.au

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​Directed & Produced, Conceived & Created by
Peter Morse

Music: Blizzard by Kai Engel

Old Frank Hurley MoCap: Peter Morse
Voice of Old Frank Hurley: Peter Morse

All animations have been digitally 
created using machine learning systems 
and should not be mistaken
for factual documentation

All visual source materials used in this
film are in the public domain

Image sources may include:
Internet Archive
Wikimedia
Trove
NSFA
Mawson Collection
Collection of the Author

AI Systems include:
​Custom ML/DL training & workflows
DeOldify (Github)
Interactive Deep Colorization (Github)
Topaz AI Gigapixel
MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia
Tokking Heads
Topaz Video Enhance AI

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