The following morning, we got up early and headed out our first stop was “Quzaiwood” (not Hollywood or Bollywood) at the Atlas film studios. The film studio is in the middle of the desert. The many sets, made with plaster, survive better in the desert due to the dry climate. They show different places like ancient Egypt, Greece, Tibbet, and Rome. The kids thought it was cool to see how the sets were built, how they didn’t quite look real when you where up close, but from a far they did, and on screen with editing they looked fantastic. This film studio was used to film, Black Hawk Down, Jewel of the Nile Asterix, the Gladiator and many more. Our guide explained why Morocco and the desert are an excellent place for the studio including climate, cost, workforce, sets longevity, and many different landscapes of Morocco being useful. He also explained how much this industry has been suffering in recent years with more CGI and AI taking over the industry. The tour guide, who had quite a charismatic personality, organized our tour group to worship Queen Cleopatra for a small film. He chose our lovely Sophie as Cleopatra and Aiden as her bodyguard. He had the entire tour group, about 20 people ,participate in making a short video honouring Cleo as an example to show us how the scenery looked on screen with good camera technique, background music and choreographing the extras (tour group). Aiden made a few spontaneous “standup comedian style jokes” for the tour group and the tour guide offered to be his manager if he ever got famous!
