TIGER in Antarctica

November 16, 2001

The big excitement today was a film crew (where "crew" means two people) came out to Willy Field. Max Quinn is a producer with Natural History New Zealand, and he comes down to Antarctica fairly regularly on an assortment of projects. This trip, he, and his cameraman Mike, are working on two programs, a National Geographic special on "Antarctica, Hot Science", and program on special uses of plastic. We're appropriate for both shows. Except for the aerogel, all of our other detectors are made with plastic. And he is very interested in the balloon material, which looks something like the cellophane wrap used in kitchens, but is much stronger.

Jason and I, and several others, spend quite a bit of time being interviewed on camera about TIGER, why we're here in Antarctica, describing our work and what we think about Antarctica. Then we spend some time doing several takes each of staged shots: walking through the snow in our big red parka, coming into the building and taking our parkas off, etc. We'll be lucky if we end up getting a few minutes in the final show, but the whole thing takes up a good part of the day. This sort of publicity is always worthwhile, however, and we're certainly not too busy to help them out.

Unfortunately, we were so engrossed with getting ourselves on film, none of us thought to take any pictures ourselves. Oh well.