Spring on the Snow Farm

Spring is in the air and you really notice it when working at the Snow Farm and Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground (SHPG). Those of you who have worked up there over the years will know how lovely and unforgiving this place can be. Beautiful sunrises, bitterly cold days, wind, over dressed, under dressed, Nordic skiers of all ages swishing gracefully along prepared tracks, tyre and ABS test cars with computers attached accelerate and skid on tarmac roads half frozen half heated, props blowing away, 10,000 BC, 30 Days of Night, Ice, The Big White, Mercedes, Audi, Infinity, Visa, Michelin, Fat Face, Everest, and IOC.

Washing mud off cars at the start of each day so it won’t stain the snow, and at end of the season inches of mud when you get home. Producers ever hopeful that the snow holds for a September shoot.

Directors still loving the power slide, the flying saucer, the Bond-esque tunnel house. Massive loaders with buckets big enough for a small car, strange looking snow and ice blowers, flat batteries, snow chains, leaving Queenstown at 4am and beating the grit truck over the Crown Range, Canada Goose, Siberian border crossings, Alaska, the Olympics.

Hoping to make it to Breakfast without needing to put chains on, hoping to make it home after a long day shooting.

Spring is in the air and I think this shoot may be my last for the season up here.

John Allan, Queenstown branch and executive committee member