Professor’s documentary nominated for Oscar
In a minus-30-degree freezer vault beneath the streets of Los Angeles, Douglas Quin prepared a small film crew for the conditions of Antarctica. He wanted them to know how to use their gear deep under water so they didn’t lose the equipment – or their fingers.
Quin, a first-year television, radio and film professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, was working on a documentary called ‘Encounters at the End of the World.’
That film, by German director Werner Herzog, was nominated last week for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Best Documentary Feature award of 2008.
‘It’s a very different kind of documentary, with its focus on people and what the human aspect of Antarctica is,’ Quin said. ‘It’s a very eclectic place, and people are motivated to go there for all different reasons, but they all are there for a different sense of adventure.’
‘Encounters at the End of the World’ premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007 and then had a limited theatrical release for about a year in smaller theaters and art houses, where it received critical attention, Quin said.
The film was originally one of 94 under consideration for the Academy Award. The 94 were cut to 15 several months ago, and on Thursday, ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ was one of five nominated for the Academy’s Best Documentary Feature award. The 81st Academy Awards will take place Feb. 22.
Prior to working at SU, Quin lived in South Carolina, where he had his own business working on sound design for museums, video games and film. One of his recent projects included designing the planetary ambiences for the video game Spore.
Quin has been fascinated with the combination of music and sculpture since his college years, he said. Robert Katz, a sculpture professor at the University of Maine, taught Quin at Oberlin College in 1979. Their relationship has since evolved from that of a student and teacher to one of artists working together, Katz said.
‘Sounds that might get by most of us, Doug is very aware of,’ Katz said. ‘He has the ability to take that sound and incorporate it into film and create these overall compositions based on his music and sculpture background.’
Quin traveled to Antarctica in 2000 and broadcast some of the first sounds of the millennium on international public radio.
‘As the world spun around from Antarctica, we broadcast live,’ Quin said. ‘We created a soundscape mix on the fly; we had remote microphones in a penguin colony, and we had hydrophones underwater where you could hear ice breaking up. I even amplified the laboratory I was in to make a wind harp so you could hear the wind and the groaning of the building,’ he said.
Several years ago, film director Werner Herzog and musician and deep-sea diver Henry Kaiser asked Quin to be their consultant on the film ‘Encounters at the End of the World.’
Kaiser brought Quin onboard originally to train as a consultant, but when they got back, Quin began to get rough cuts of the footage and soon took on the role of sound designer and audio mixer. The film features original music by Kaiser and guitarist David Lindley.
Quin said what originally attracted him to the film was its unique angle.
‘A lot of Antarctic documentaries tend to focus on wildlife and certain aspects of science,’ Quin said. ‘Herzog’s interest was really in what motivated people to go down there. … There are people who have Ph.D.’s and are washing dishes just for the experience – for a sense of adventure.’
Once Herzog and Kaiser returned from their six-week trip to the South Pole, Quin started mixing the recordings he had done in 2000 with original music and interviews.
‘Wind is always present down there,’ Quin said. ‘We would get hurricane blizzards and snow and ice coming at you horizontally. So, I recorded in an empty million-gallon fuel tank the sound of wind and ice hitting the tank. We wove that in it, too.’
Quin grew up in both South Africa and Europe, two countries with unique cultures and music that he said influence his own work.
‘I was always exposed to different languages, different music and the sounds of different wildlife. I was always tuned into sound,’ Quin said. ‘Sound can take us places the visual world can’t. Our inner imaginings can be triggered from the beauty of sound alone. You know, where did our music come from? There is no single answer, but the search is certainly worth it.’
