Vampire Penguins Take the Stage at the Calgary Underground Film Festival’s Live Script Reading
Graphic courtesy of Calgary Underground Film Festival.
Now, book readings may be all the hype these days, but have you ever heard of a live script reading? Annually, the Calgary Underground Film Festival (CUFF) hosts Albertan filmmakers to present their scripts in front of a live audience, a showcase that has helped several Canadian films take major steps towards production. For its 23rd edition, CUFF is bringing writers Andrew David Long and Val Duncan, alongside cast members, for a reading of Queen of the Vampire Penguins.
Long, the executive director of the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF) and Duncan, the executive director of Quickdraw Animation Society, both come from acting backgrounds and share a long-standing affection for the strange and the handmade. Their new script is an unapologetic celebration of both.
“It’s Nosferatu meets Happy Feet” is how Long describes Queen of The VampirePenguins in his one line pitch. Duncan says “It’s Black Hawk Down meets The Muppets.” In a breathless mashup, the co-writers say the absurdity of it lives somewhere in between those reference points.
The origins of Queen of the Vampire Penguins are as offbeat as its title. Outlined over one road trip from Edmonton to Calgary, the project is a rescue mission gone wrong featuring vampire penguins thawed from ancient ice.
“It’s kind of our love letter to the way that the practical effects and absurdity actually maybe give us a better look at human life than all the AI and all the CGI that money can buy,” Long said. “We were hanging out for dinner one night and just started talking about movies like The Thing, and the techniques and that sort of sense of containment and isolation that lends itself so really, really well to genre filmmaking” says Long.
Very quickly, a straightforward polar horror idea slid into something stranger.
“We are silly by nature,” Duncan said. “Secretly, deep in the cockles of our hearts, we are absurdists. So what’s the most absurd thing that can happen when you’re at the Arctic research station — in that history of, you know, like The Thing? — Somehow we landed on penguins and vampires.”
While the story is set in Antarctica, it draws on the real Calgary-based regional airline, Kenn Borrek Air’s expeditions to the area.
“[Kenn Borek Air] have got the planes for it. [Kenn Borek Air] have got the crews who are equipped for it. So even though it seems like we're a long, long way from the south pole, because we are a very long, long way from the South Pole — they're actually one of the teams that is best equipped to handle those flights. So, we felt like it had a little local angle, and we liked that about it. So it's, it's, what would we call it a rescue mission gone awry,” says Long.
In their story, a research station studying penguins goes dark. A team of pilots and medics is sent in to evacuate the scientists and bring them home. “When they arrive, they find that carnage has ensued,” said Duncan. “Some of these researchers are missing. Some of them are dead, some of them are sick, and it’s up to this team of pilots and medics to figure out what has happened and to get themselves safely out of Antarctica.”
From the outset, they imagined the film using practical effects and puppetry, not CGI. Calgary is in the midst of what Duncan calls a “puppet renaissance,” with companies like The Old Trouts, Green Fools, Bleeding Art Industries and the Canadian Academy of Masks and Puppetry creating elaborate creatures for stage and screen.
“Something practical will always be a better illusion, because the eye can see that there’s something real,” said Duncan. “CGI has gotten great… but it never looks real the way an actual object looks real. Our eyes are too good at identifying the difference between real and fake.”
Long is more blunt. “Good CGI is really expensive. But it doesn’t actually do for the eye what people think it does most of the time,” he said.
For now, there are no firm production plans, but the reading is a critical step. The duo’s hoping that Queen of the Vampire Penguins takes on the success of previous films, like Man vs. Truck, and takes the production leap.
“The script reading is a chance for us to basically hear it, maybe start adapting it,” said Long. “You find out what people respond to — what’s working, what’s not working. You get to hear other actors put their takes on it.”
For Duncan, there’s no better place to present this script than CUFF. “I can’t think of a better audience to share work with at this early stage than the CUFF audience, because I know that they’re like-minded… they share our tastes, they share our aesthetics,” she said.