Ghosts of Antarctica

Peter Morse


Ghosts of Antarctica

Medium Type
A/V work
Duration
00:08:10
Size
UHD, 4K
Audio channels
Stereo
Music
Blizzard by Kai Engle
Year
2021


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.


Ghosts of Antarctica
Ghosts of Antarctica
Directed & Produced, Conceived & Created by Peter Morse
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


Biography

Peter Morse is an Australian media artist, film-maker and computer researcher.