I’ve been working on my Vive-tracking robotic cameras for just over a year now, and I’m falling over with excitement to announce that they’re now autonomous enough to have their own name:
Cinema Swarm
For the first public outing of the multi-camera system, we filmed 24 bands in 2 days.
To be in Brisbane’s best music venue, surrounded by hugely talented people, and have this crazy thing working, moving, tracking, and capturing footage exactly how I’d hoped it would when I first designed it inside my brain. That was a pretty special time.
In the lead up to the release of Emma Louise’ new album Supercry, Mushroom Records asked if I’d spend a day with Emma and record some intimate, solo live tracks in one of her favourite creative spaces, Brisbane’s Old Museum.
This video started the same way all Ball Park Music videos start – drinking coffee and talking about internets. The difference with Nihilist is that we grabbed those internets and decided they should be the whole video.
We had such a lovely time making the Ball Park Music tour visuals last year, so when it was time to release music from their first album in 2 years, Sam and the gang decided that they wanted to do some things that were leaning more towards visuals than traditional music videos.
Pariah is a sprawling, 7+ minute, mostly instrumental jam. Sam creates much of the band’s visual style through collage of old images, which fit the tone of the song beautifully, so I took his raw cutout materials, and turned them into a journey through time and space:
The band were understandably nervous about this kind of track being their first new material in years, but the public response to both the track and visual style was overwhelmingly positive, supportive, and loving.
So it looks like there will be a couple more of these to come. Yes indeed. We’ll also be able to use them as live visuals for future festival shows. Bonus!
Update: After release, Rage – Australia’s publicly-funded, greatest-music-video-show-in-the-history-of-the-world contacted the label to ask for a copy of the clip. I didn’t think we’d bother to submit a 7-minute long piece of mostly-visuals, but they played it third on Friday night, and then first up at 9am on Saturday! Thanks for keeping it weird for all these decades, Rage.
After filming some of Aerialicious’ wonderful variety performance at last year’s Wonderland Festival at Brisbane Powerhouse, I was asked to edit a promo for their entire show.
Combining footage from two other shooters with my own, we put together a 2-minute overview of their sparkly aerial burlesque extravaganza!
Pete from Hey Geronimo has directed all of their varied works. He asked me to be DoP for his planned remake, and solve the not-insignificant problem of having a camera smoothly traverse 85m with precise timing, and without a large budget.
I’ve loved working with WAAX as they thrash their way through the early years of their careers. After the robotic glitch explosion of Wisdom Teeth and the strange mirror-world of I For An Eye, we wanted to do something simple, visceral and effective for the launch of their Holy Sick EP and tour.
Hence, a live music video, recorded in a single, sweat-drenched take at their home ground of Black Bear Lodge in Fortitude Valley.
I’ve been filming various events and promos with Brisbane Powerhouse for much of 2015, all the while colluding with them to combine the huge breadth of footage I was capturing into a TV ad which showcases the Powerhouse as a whole.
We dubbed this project the Destination Trailer. It’s part of their Discover Brisbane Powerhouse campaign, which launched in November 2015.
The piece distilled months of filming into precisely 20 seconds, because Television. To include some more awesome stuff we’ve also produced an extended “Director’s Cut” for web.
Following up WAAX’s Wisdom Teeth video, we needed a clip which would deliver their fresh new lineup to the world, while giving plenty of focus to Marie’s ferocious presence.