A Song of Oil, Ice and Fire

Don’t Panic has teamed up with Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign and famous British montage artists Kennardphillipps, to create the video “A Song of Oil, Ice and Fire“, targeting oil giant Shell and its plans to drill in the icy waters of the US Alaskan Arctic this summer.

Climate change is one of the greatest threats of our time. Yet shockingly, as increasingly warmer temperatures cause the ice to recede in the Arctic, oil companies are targeting the vulnerable region to extract more of the fossil fuels that have caused this melt in the first place. This absurd reality is made worse by the difficult conditions and remoteness of the area, increasing the risk and potential impact of an oil spill.The short film shows three iconic landscape artworks burning away to expose jarring dystopian replacements by British montage artists Kennardphillipps. The famous artworks include ‘Pearblossom Highway’ by David Hockney, ‘Christina’s World’ by Andrew Wyeth and ‘An Arctic Summer: Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay’ by William Bradford. In the new artworks, the scenes have been transformed by Shell drilling infrastructure, devastating oil spills and explosions. It gives the viewer a powerful sense of what Shell risks by drilling in the Arctic.Below is a still from the reimagined US artwork Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth to show how it would look after an oil spill.

There are several “easter eggs” throughout the film which, we invite viewers to try and spot. These popular cultural references imagine fictional characters suffering the same fate that we might experience and parallel a potentially disastrous arctic oil spill to their own dystopian wasteland worlds.We’d love for you to share it via your website or social media channels to give this crucial campaign the voice it needs. The video can be viewed on Greenpeace’s youtube channel and Facebook page.