Film 01 - The techniques

After all, it seems there was no sympathy for the whales. There was the thrill of the hunt and the animals' size was not enough to make the whalers reach the realms of empathy.

Today on a tv show the hostess said as joke that "it's like when you put a lobster into boiling water, it makes these littles noises like it's screaming.". I liked very much that hostess, but that's it. I knew she had ruined it. TO forgive cruelty towards animals is something beyond my ability.

Let's see if I find a way to deal with this subject.

In a film there are different voices: image, narration and music are the main ones for me.

This film doesn't have a narration and it's the first film the visitors see in the museum. It has black and white photos and color photos, and I don't think it's a good idea to convert the color photos to black and white. In some color photos there's blood in the water and in the air, the bursts out of the blow holes of the wounded animals.


These black and white photos that I got from the web seem to work ok over the background with round rocks. I think that the color photos will work too.

Images tell their story and music will react emotionally to what's being told. Music can react in many ways and we're not obligated to choose a specific one: it can show the excitement of hunting, the danger and the pain, sometimes in a sequence, other times simultaneously. And music will be conscient that this film is an overture.

Fishing was a more irregular source of income that whaling, so whaling is remembered with some nostalgia in the village.


Over 90% of the hunted animals were spermwhales. They don't sink and they are not as fast as the baleen whales. Right whales (one of my favorites) was slow, but they were nearly extinct in the XIX century.



Spermwhales have a defense behaviour that helped the whalers: when a member of the group is in danger, the group gathers around him. This way, the whalers could easilly kill a whole group.

At a certain point, they started to let the young animals go. They required almost as much work as the adults and the profit was much less.

When they started to use a canon with the purpose of hunting baleen whales, things didn't get better, the ship wasn't fast enough to chase the whales.

It's said also that the man that operated the canon had a hard time hitting the targets. He not only missed the animals, but he also scared the men in the smaller whalers boats, that were not confident at all in their colleague's skills. And it's good to have in mind that we're talking about explosive harpoons.

In the beginning, men would approach the whales silently, with sails and rows. This had some disadvantages. The men got tired and since the man that threw the harpoon was also helping his mates, when he was throwing the harpoon or the spear, he wasn't very effective.

The most successful technique appeared with the use of motors in the whaler boats: the siege. The whaler boats scared the whales into shallow waters with the noise of the motors and the killing would take place near the shore.