Production
The DVD version includes a 54 minute film entitled Of Penguins and Men made by the film crew Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Mason about the filming of March of the Penguins.
Director and film crew spent more than 13 months at the Dumont d'Urville Station where the Institut polaire français Paul-Émile Victor is based. Although the penguins' meeting place, one of four in Antarctica, was known to be near, the day on which it occurs isn't known so they had to be ready every day. Fortunately the gathering that year was huge - more than 1,200 penguins, compared with the norm of a few hundred.
For cameras to operate at -40°C (-40 °F) they had to use film and to load all the film for the day, as it was impossible to reload outside. Because of the isolation from any film studios it was necessary to remember each shot to ensure continuity and to make sure that all the necessary sequences were finished.
The main challenge of making the film was the weather with temperatures between -50 and -60 °C (-58 and -76°F). At dawn the film crew would spend half an hour putting on six layers of clothes, and on some days they couldn't spend more than three hours outside. They worked in winds with gusts up to 125 miles per hour, "which in some ways is worse than the cold temperatures" according to director Jaquet.
Read more about this topic: March Of The Penguins
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