Imagine Ian Roberts, dressed in a futuristic, body-hugging suit with utility pockets, clambering into a sleek-looking spacecraft while dodging laser beams fired by his enemies (played by Anna-Mart van der Merwe and SelloMaake ka Ncube, made up as scary aliens fromMars). He barely escapes from the Johannesburg spaceport and dashes off into space — but he has been infected by a lethal virus, and soon his flesh starts crawling and melting horribly …
An unlikely sequence of events to see on local television? Definitely. We’re much more used to the comparatively low-budget police drama series, family sagas and soaps that the South African production houses churn out.
But after watching a National Geographic documentary about prehistoric mosses that are still alive under the ice masses of the Antarctic, amazingly put into a form of suspended animation by the cold, scriptwriter and producer Paul C Venter was inspired to create Een Skoenlapper, a new Afrikaans drama series described as a “biological thriller” that started this Thursday on SABC2.
“What if, from prehistoric times, the mother of all viruses, the real big one, has been lying hidden under the Antarctic?” asks Venter. This is the premise of Een Skoenlapper, which is set in 2006. A worker from a group doing highly secretive and illegal oil drilling in Antarctica is mysteriously killed by an unknown disease and microbiologist Braam Steenberg (Chris Vorster) and medical doctor Svetlana Bloem-Coetzee (Anriette vanRooyen) have to establish the cause of death. Their theory of a prehistoric virus is rejected by Svetlana’s husband, Gordon Coetzee (played by Hannes Brummer), who heads the drilling operation and who would like to keep the whole matter quiet. But then their subsequent findings are even more alarming, enough to involve the oil group’s head, William Williamson (Graham Hopkins), and leading to an excursion into Central Africa to search for fossils.
It’s been said that the special effects in the series are the best used to date inSouth Africa. “They’re the only ones!” laughs Venter. “There just isn’t the money for it.” If the production team had employed a special-effects studio full-time, the budget would have been about R6-million. Instead it came up with innovative and more affordable ways to create the same effects, such as what the ancient virus does to the human body.
Venter tells how the Antarctic scenes were filmed on mine dumps in Benoni. The layered snow and ice effects were achieved with coarse salt, foam sprayed by the fire brigade, white-coloured rice crispies and some computer-generated snow washes. Not quite Star Wars, but a worthy effort.
It took nine weeks to shoot the live action for the six episodes and almost a year to add all the special effects, with the help of the post-production team at postMasters
“If we had the money, we could create special effects that are just as good as those created overseas,” says Venter. “The imagination and creativity is here, but at the moment we are forced to improvise.”
So even though Ian Roberts doesn’t quite need to start practising his space flying, South African science-fiction fans can still get a glimpse of what can be done — where there’s a will, there’s a (budget) way, after all.
” Another new science-fiction series starting this week is Freakylinks, premiering on DStv’s Sci-Fi channel. Ethan Embry is Derek, the webmaster of an Internet site that aims to uncover the truth about strange phenomena. He is spurred on by the mysterious death of his twin brother, who started the site.
Expect an entertaining X-Files meets Blair Witch Project feel (complete with some hand-held camera shots) as Derek and friends each week investigate things going bump in the night. There is also a long-term storyline that starts in the first episode when Derek finds startling evidence that his brother might still be alive, linked to a British colony in the United States that disappeared without a trace in the 1500s.
The details
See Een Skoenlapper on SABC2 on Thursdays at 7.30pm and Freakylinks on DStv’s Sci-Fi channel on Sunday evenings at 9pm