Proton movies

A humorous short film made by three secondary school students received an award at a Geneva film festival.

Even without millions of dollars or Hollywood stars at your disposal, it is still possible to make a good science fiction film about CERN. That is what three students from the Collège Madame de Staël in Carouge, near Geneva, demonstrated. For their amateur short film on the LHC, they were commended by the jury of the video and multimedia festival for schools organised by the "Media in education" service of the Canton of Geneva’s Public Education Department. The film is a spoof of a television news report on the LHC start-up. In sequences full of humour and imagination, the reporter conducts interviews with a very serious "Professor Sairne", some protons preparing for their voyage and even the neutrons that were rejected by the LHC. "We got the idea of making a film about CERN at the end of the summer," explains Lucinda Päsche, one of the three students. "We did our research by reading web pages and articles." None of the three had ever visited CERN. One student wrote the plot, the second wrote the script, and the third produced the storyboard. The three girls, all 15 years of age, took two afternoons for the actual shoot. As sets they used an apartment building basement for the LHC tunnels, and an office of a family member as the pretend-physicist’s office. The roles of the diminutive protons and neutrons were valiantly handled by the film-makers’ younger sister and her friend. The amateur cinematographers were pleasantly surprised to get the special mention, and even more astonished upon being contacted by CERN. They have been invited to visit the CMS experiment soon. Having displayed such imagination, they have definitely earned a visit to the real tunnels of the LHC!

Visit the website of the "Video and multimedia festival" for schools of the Canton of Geneva.