Mila Werbik has begun to make her mark on the non-commercial movie world with a series of films, many of which blend still images with video to great effect. Mila manages to get away from running the Humboldt House Bed & Breakfast to attend festivals in the USA and the UNICA festivals which are held in a different country each year.

In 2007 she received awards from AMMA and Ten Best Of The West for Out of Antarctica. In 2008 Survival of the Penguins got an AMMA award, Venice - My Beautiful Rescue got a Ten Best of the West award and Iguaza Falls received an AMPS award. 

Usually stills are incorporated in amateur film as a gimmick and signalled as such - for example a film showing someone using a still camera might cut to the photo they took, often setting it in a white border and turning it at an angle - or faking it to look like the image through a camera viewfinder. They may add a loud click sound to imitate a camera shutter. A film featuring archive material might include photographs with an unspoken apology that "they are all that is available". Now and then people drop a still image in to establish a scene or serve as backdrop behind a performer in front of a green screen - in such cases they try to hide the fact it is still. But Mila blends powerful images and in her work she moves smoothly between still and moving images without gimmicks or apology.

My youngest daughter, Cynthia, was always helping me, but now when she is more involved in school I am trying to do it all on my own. In future I would like to make a better Antarctica movie, choose different music and use also narration.

I am working now on a short movie about the Unica festival in 2008 movie, which took place in Hammammet, Tunisia in North Africa.  Once again I am combining still images and clips. I will probably use Paul Simon's song Under African Skies. That includes the lines: "His path was marked / By the stars in the southern hemisphere / And he walked his days / Under african skies".  I like it very much - and I think it is very important for me to find music which both fits the images ... and which I personally enjoy.  I am also putting together a movie about my travels in Thailand.

My approach to movies is simple: I film what I like the most. Because I mostly do documentaries about my travels, I try to create a little story with a beginning, middle, end and a summary.

A typical sequence from Antarctica:

Still with caption superimposed

blends to ship's prow in the harbour.

Then we see the prow meeting ocean waves ...

and zoom in slowly until ...

we cut to moving footage of crashing waves.

There is a well-known Stan Stearns photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin at JFK's funeral where the child seems to be smiling. In his book Pictures on a Page, Harold Evans explains that by pointing out that we have all become used to smiling whenever a camera is pointed at us.

I am not a solo explorer - I usually travel with an organized adventure tour - so "waiting for an hour until the light is perfect" is not possible. I need to move fast, having both cameras handy. I like to take still images and portraits of people and these do take time. You can't shoot right away. I first make contact with the person and then I ask if I can take a picture or video of them. The funny thing is that people are often not natural in front of the lens, they try to pose.

In my newest video Out of Antarctica, I use a sunset as an ending, fading out, then putting up some credits. As music for this film I used Mozart's Clarinet Concerto. I use lots of transitions, as they break the gap between still images and video clips. And I sometimes use background noise, but sometimes when the background noise would be distractive, then I lower it and let the music take over.

- Mila Werbik