A surprising thing happened when "Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure" screened for the first time in Utah last week.
The large-format film's producer, Scott Swofford, watched the credits roll for probably the hundredth time. Then, as the theater lights came up, he was too choked up to speak.
An alumnus of Skyline High School (he also graduated from Brigham Young University), Swofford lives in South Jordan and is one of the large-format firmament's veteran producers. He's traveled across 45 countries, making such IMAX-type movies as "Olympic Glory" and "Mysteries of Egypt." He also has a five-feature deal with Disney.
But it's the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the explorer whose voyage to the South Pole descended into an epic debacle, that still moves Swofford to tears.
"We live in an age where so many of our heroes are multimillionaire sports stars, or they're frankly not real people, like ('Tomb Raider's') Lara Croft," the producer said.
"You don't come across real heroes like Shackleton every day."
Swofford's "Antarctic Adventure" takes Shackleton's trip — 635 days navigating gale-torn seas in a lifeboat, camping on ice floes, trekking across frozen South Georgia Island — and boils it down to a 40-minute film. It's a radiantly beautiful picture, an impressive tribute to the explorer's courage and the product of Swofford's own harrowing travels to the unearthly places where Shackleton went in 1914.
The producer and his 45-member crew, two-thirds of whom are also Utahns, went to Antarctica in 1999 to revisit as many of the Shackleton expedition sites as humanly possible. And seeing the massive icebergs, glaciers and cruelly cold seas, it must have been hard to comprehend how the earlier explorers had survived. Now, one might think, with modern technology beefing up everything from clothing to cameras, the journey might not be as dangerous as it was in Shackleton's time. But on several occasions, Swofford doubted that he would make it back to Utah.
First, there's the Antarctic ocean. "If you're in the water for four minutes, you lose fine motor control," Swofford began. "You're toast." Then there are things like hurricanes that can and did blow in, to trap the film crew on an ice floe overnight. Antarctic temperatures can plunge to 77 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
It's too cold and desolate for polar bears; only penguins can withstand the elements. And seals — but these aren't the graceful, fun-loving kind. Antarctic leopard seals scared Swofford not a little, hoisting their 300-pound bulk over the edge of his boat. He had the feeling they weren't primarily interested in playing. "There were decapitated penguins floating around us," he remembered.
Yet producer and crew did return home to the Beehive State, albeit without some of the ice-camping footage they needed. They turned then to Utah's Strawberry Reservoir and Seven Peaks water park and dressed them up like Antarctica.
"Early in the morning, there's massive ground fog around the reservoir," Swofford said. "That obscured the mountains," making the place filmable as Shackleton's "ocean camp" on the Weddell Sea, the path to the South Pole. "Most of the camp scenes you see in the film were in Utah," either at Strawberry or at Seven Peaks. "We brought in a portable moon and made waves," the producer added, "and we used 20 gallons of dishwashing detergent to make the waves look foamy."
In "Antarctic Adventure," it's exceedingly difficult to recognize any of the Utah locations. But doubtless Swofford was relieved while filming and while watching the finished product that Strawberry Reservoir worked as well as the Weddell Sea. The polar expedition was arduous far beyond his expectations.
On some nights, the crew used bungee cords to strap themselves into their bunks, and sea swells made it nearly impossible to keep plates on a table, much less eat anything. Toward the end of the trip, the crew reached Elephant Island, where towering, jagged peaks are swathed in snow year-round. "I thought, 'Man, oh man, this is the end of the Earth,'" recalled Swofford.
By that time, he said, he was more than ready to go home. But there were to be more mishaps. For nearly a day, he was stuck floating in a small boat, surrounded by penguins that the leopard seals had beheaded, with nothing but a Thermos of tepid cocoa for company. "The only way it could have been worse was if it was raining. So it started to rain."
Swofford says he's always relieved when his plane touches down in Salt Lake City but that his movie about Antarctica made him feel more grateful than before. "There were moments when I wondered if a movie was worth dying for."
But just as Shackleton's story ended happily — he and all of his crew survived their unfathomably trying expedition — Swofford is enjoying considerable afterglow. "Antarctic Adventure" is playing on large-format movie screens in about 30 major cities across North America, including the SuperScreen at Jordan Commons in Sandy. It will stay there through next June.
At his film's premiere, fellow filmmakers approached Swofford to embrace him.
E-MAIL: durbani@desnews.com