My favourite kind of 'to do' list

BREAK

Really looking forward to having some time off over Xmas and New Year. Should be able to get a good couple of weeks or R&R in. About to jump in the car and make the annual pilgrimage to my home town Tamworth in New South Wales. Family road trip here we come! I had some photos to post... but for some reason after I updated Wordpress to the new version 3.3 I can no longer upload images... I'm sure there is a fix around the corner, but if anyone has any hints, I'm all ears!

In the meantime, I'm hoping you all have a super Christmas and relaxing New Year!

Also... This!

Done.

Finished Beaconsfield today...! Although that old saying does spring to mind... "You don't ever finish a film, you abandon it..."

Don't have an on air date as yet... but I suspect it will be early-ish next year maybe.

Some snaps taken during production that haven't made it here after the break...

Sit down, shut up and watch this!

Vladivostok Skate Kids

The group show at the Centre For Contempory Photography I have been part of here in Melbourne ends this week and goes on a two year gallery tour around Australia. The images I had in the show form part of a larger series of photographs I made last year in Vladivostok, a remote city in the far east of Russia. The boys were skating in a park on the edge of town that featured a large statue of King Neptune. They were like kids anywhere else in the world hanging out, killing time.  But to me there was something about these boys that represented a city and a country in transition.

Exhibition tour dates and more images of the CCP show after the break.

Documentation photographs by Andrew Burford.

Tour Itinerary for the eighth CCP Documentary Photography Award

COWRA REGIONAL ART GALLERY

EXHIBTION DATES: 27/10/11 – 11/12/11

LOGAN ART GALLERY

EXHIBTION DATES: 04/04/12 – 12/05/12

GLADSTONE REGIONAL ART GALLERY AND MUSEUM

EXHIBTION DATES: 19/05/12 – 30/06/12

HERVEY BAY REGIONAL GALLERY

EXHIBTION DATES: 09/0812 – 22/09/12

WAGGA WAGGA ART GALLERY

EXHIBTION DATES: 05/10/12 – 09/12/12

BENALLA ART GALLERY

EXHIBTION DATES: 26/01/13 – 10/03/13

MUSWELLBROOK REGIONAL ARTS CENTRE

EXHIBTION DATES: 22/03/13 – 12/05/13

ORANGE REGIONAL GALLERY

EXHIBTION DATES: 31/05/13 – 07/07/13

ART SPACE WODONGA

EXHIBTION DATES: 19/07/13 – 10/08/13

SWAN HILL REGIONAL ART GALLERY

EXHIBTION DATES: 15/08/13 – 29/09/13

MILDURA ARTS CENTRE

EXHIBTION DATES: 04/10/13 – 17/11/13

40!

5!

Happy Birthday Rosebud!

THE DARKNESS

Been spending the week sitting in the dark, colour grading guys sitting in the dark. Most our conversation about the grade has been about how 'dark' we can make 'the darkness'. I wrote  a few months ago about how black a mine really is and I know if we were grading for 'cinema' we could perhaps go a sniff  darker than we have. But as Beaconsfield is for broadcast we have to take into consideration that people may watch the film, heaven forbid, with a light on or even wierder, they may not be watching the film on a 'broadcast calibrated monitor'.

Regardless, I'm really happy with the direction the grade is heading and it feels great to be on this side of a long production schedule and to be almost 'finished'.

There will be research

When I first saw the clip below, my first thought was how useful this would be to see if how effective your visual storytelling is, to asses composition and to study how an audience views a sequence. My second thought was how all the marketing folk will use it to asses if an audience is staring at their hamburger/cereal box/car long enough.

And my third thought was how incredible Paul Thomas Anderson's  has 'blocked' this scene! The way the camera leads you to reveal the other characters and open up the dialgogue between those characters.

Either way this is pretty bloody fascinating!

'This is an excerpt from There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). 11 adult viewers were shown the video and their eye movements recorded using an Eyelink 1000 (SR Research) infra-red camera-based eyetracker. Each dot represents the center of one viewer's gaze. The size of each dot represents the length of time they have held fixation.'

More info and research examples from TheDIEMProject here.

Thanks John Brawley!

REED-CORE

Spent some time in Sydney over the last week with Stephen Rae who is composing the soundtrack for Beaconsfield. Being a story that takes place predominatley underground, early conversations were about 'elemental' and 'organic' sounds. The sound of rocks, air and water and music that forms in and out of the environment. For the past few weeks (amongst our discussions about cameras, watches and motorbikes) we have been working through demos and musical sketches and these ideas are now becoming more defined. Through Stephens sonic explorations we have settled on the clarinet as one of the key instruments. I must admit I've never been drawn to the clarinet, I tend to steer clear of  'reed instruments' in general, (except I'm quite fond of the oboe), but  the way Stephen is using it is really different. Then I realised there is a whole album I love that uses the clarinet in a beautifully textured and ambient way. So I'm really looking forward to see how it all keeps progressing.

Below: Sydney mid afternoon storm, recording studio flowers and Peter Jenkin (lead Clarinet of the Sydney Opera) recording clarinet sounds for Stephen to compose and edit with. 

Queanbeyan

TWO / OUT

Took the kids to see Red Dog a few weeks ago. So good to sit in a 'packed' cinema for a Australian film, and one you can take the kids to see too. Red Dog is a lot of fun and I can see why audiences have been going to see it in droves. But rather than this be a post all about Red Dog, I thought it could be a good excuse to post one of my all time favourite short films. Two/Out which is directed by Kriv Stenders, who also directed Red Dog. Two/Out was a bit of revelation to me when I saw it for the first time. There was and still is something so compelling about the simplicity of this film, which is so brutal and raw, yet at the same time, so warm and human.

Every now and then I go and chat to film students and I always try and show them this film in a hope to inspire and acknowledge that you don't need much to make a great film. If you have a good story, all you might need is two characters, one room and a single locked off camera. Can't really get more simple than that.

CCP EXHIBITION

I've had four images selected for the Documentary Photography Award exhibition at CCP (Centre for Contemporary Photography) here in Melbourne. The four photographs selected are of some skate kids I met in Vladivostok, Russia last year. From the CCP invitation...'The CCP Documentary Photography Award is a biennial showcase of contemporary Australian documentary photography. Since the inaugural exhibition in 1997, this event has grown in profile and significance. It represents a unique, national initiative in support of documentary photography, providing a rare opportunity to assess the themes, styles and ideas that characterise this fascinating genre. This year's exhibition demonstrates the breadth of contemporary approaches to documentary practice from traditional black and white narratives through to vibrant colour recordings, all of which have been achieved without digital manipulation. Themes range from the effects of war on US Marines through to dog shows, roller derby and the annual Miss South Sudan Australia pageant.'

For anyone who'd like to come along, the opening night is this Thursday the 27th of October at CCP, 404 George Street, Fitzroy. Exhibition details and more here...

I found the shots below buried in my Aperture files of the sorting process back when I was submitting the work.

PROGRESSIVE OBSESSIVE

If you have no interest in 70's inspired jazz-fused-prog-rock... you might want to click somewhere else. But if you do, you might like to listen to this 8 minute 'edit' of the 23 minute epic from Steve Wilson's new solo album Grace For Drowning. All of it, the flutes, melotrons, saxophones, guitars, pianos, choirs, it's nerdy as hell but I'm totally obsessed with it right now. Steven Wilson - Raider (edit) (full track from Grace for Drowning) by Kscope

Canberra

Travelled to Canberra this weekend to see my wife Natalie dance in a show, which was great. Arrived after the seven hour drive from Melbourne at the venue to find a metal kid, an 80's thrash kid and a skin head kid drinking beer together directly in front of where I parked. I looked around thinking there must have been a photo shoot taking place or a film being made near by. These kids were styled so perfectly. Got to love Canberra!