Nyah West : Pt 1

Geting ready for the screening at the Nyah West Silos for the school centenary. Nearly there.

Thanks to al the kids at Nyah west for their excellent drawings...the teachers for being so helpfull while I was there and also to RAV for making all of it possible.

the Rhyme of the Ancient Merino - trailer

I finally got around to scraping together a Merino trailer for the web. I have been meaning to do this for such a long time.

There is plenty of making of stuff on the blog here if you want to go  digging and hopefully I'll get a chance to upload more over the next few weeks.

But for now...

Enjoy

Highly Strung - In retrospect

Well its taken a few months for me to get around to editing this together (not that I spent a few months on the edit, I just had a bit of other stuff to catch up on) but here it is. A five minute collection of shots from  Highly Strung, the silo show.



Don't expect it to make a whole lot of sense, its all out of sequence and taken from both the rehearsals as well as the final show. Its just a collection of shots to demonstrate the kind of stuff that was going on in the show.

Putting it together, I really wished I had more footage of the puppeteers doing their thing actually. Looking back that's possibly the most interesting aspect of the show for me, the things that people (who were nearly invisible during the performance) had to do to put the giant puppet through its paces.

An early rehearsal where we had 3 operators up on ropes (Wendy, Callum, Kate)

Damo A and Callum on the legs as the puppet is caught in one of the all too common freak gusts of wind

Kete, Damo J, Michelle Anthony, Gareth, Jac, Callum

Michelle McFarlane (Head Turn Technician)

Gareth Llewellin (Chief Up/Down Guy)

Anthony  (Left Elbow Operator) & Kate (the Bird in the Hand)

The coordination required to get the puppet into pose sometimes involved up to 10 people all doing there part and with no way to see how the puppet actually looked. They just had to have faith that, when each of them did X at time Y, it was a good thing.

(photos Michelle McFarlane)

If I did the show again I'd definitely make more of a feature out of the puppeteers, lighting them up rather than hiding them away.

Nati Frinj Festival

Ive just been setting up a blog to help promote the upcoming 2011 Nati Frinj Festival and thought while I had the embed vid code in my copy buffer I might as well put it up here too.


The show "Space and Place" was performed on the side of the Natimuk silos as part of the 2004 Nati Frinj Festival. Y-space did the aerial performance and Transience (mostly me) did the animation. I know these days every other building you see has got some sort video installation taking place on the side of it but back in 2004 when we did this I think it was at least vaguely innovative. Also I think the combination of aerial performance and video projection is a niche that still has a lot of potential. We are hoping to develop a new Silos show for the 2011 festival but it is still very much "funding pending" at the moment. Ive got a whole lot of new ideas Im pretty excited about....just need a few dollars to make it all happen.


Also of note...this is the show that inspired the"silo" scene in the Rhyme of The Ancient Merino.

I have been involved in a few other projection type shows as well...I will try and get myself organised to finds some links to a few of these also.