Gypsy

I was lucky enough to have spent this afternoon feasting (ok and drinking margheritas) with the old crew during a six hour stopover in Los Angeles, and am I am currently onboard a flight for JFK airport, New York. (WiFi on flights?! What will they think of next?!). "New York?", you may be asking.With some fantastic support from the festival, I’ve come out to New York to see T is for Teacher screen at the LIGLIFF.

Whilst in New York, I’ll be doing some further research for the documentary film I plan to film in earnest in Jan / Feb. It tentatively has the working title The Songs They Sang (and you can read more about it here). I also plan to have a few days off and go see the Statue of liberty (which I didn’t get to do properly last time) and hopefully the Grey Gardens house that the Beales lived in.

Airports, jetlag, shit food, reunions, separations and departures… the gypsy life has started up once again. Whilst I haven’t got exact dates yet, the places I am set to travel to in the coming six months include India, Thailand (mostly for kicks, but a small amount of filming), then Lithuania, Rome, Tel Aviv, Washington and New York (again). There’s not much budget to stretch on this film, but it’s definitely being stretched far and there’s already some interesting material and exciting collaboration on the horizon.



Barely 24 hours ago, I was filming another two music videos for Georgia Fields (One of them hilariously kooky - See above) and the other moody, evocative, with old school back projections and some simple shots. They won't see the light of day till Feb, but it's by far my best work yet. Huge thanks to Rosie (best AD ever), hilarious actor Ash Flanders and hair / makeup whizz gals Helen and Mel. After the 18 hour shoot, there was then a mad rush to get from A to B (a high school reunion, documentary meetings, some friends I'd been neglecting) before getting on a plane... I'm so deliriously tired, but given that my flight gets into JFK airport at 12:30am, I think I'll hit the hay straight away and bypass jetlag all together.... well, it makes for a good plan, right?

Links

Georgia Fields' music video has been slowly gaining momentum on Youtube in the lead up to television transmission. There's a lovely review of the song and clip here.

T is for Teacher now has a dedicated site here. The film has just been selected for the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (New York) in November and a few interested parties have emailed me about the possibility of aquisition, transmission. It's still very early days, but it's really lovely that the film is still on peoples radar.

'One Finger' - Music Video

And then…

I’m just adding the finishing touches to Georgia Field’s music video… something that got put on the backburner whilst a nursed a flu, chased some grants, fraternised with some lovely film festivals.


Georgia Fields in the One Finger music video

There’s a whole heap of stuff popping up on the horizon. Moonlite is going into production in early December. Without going into too much detail, it’s the story of Andrew George Scott, aka the notorious Australian bushranger, Captain Moonlite. Simon Matthews has been developing his (already moving) play into a brilliant script for film – tight, thrilling and (perhaps most importantly) fun. We’ve been meeting weekly, and I’ve been helping to tighten, tweak, script edit, offer moral support, and start to assemble a team to help us get the whole thing on the road. We intend to shoot entirely in studio early December and present the final film as a sort of graphic noval (with a twist) in mid/late 2010. I’ve done a couple of tests and although there’s a long way to go, I’m pretty confident that we are working on is something pretty special, both in terms of form and content.


Richard Stables as Scott, Moonlite, test shoot.

As soon as Moonlite is shot, I’m holidaying in India for a few weeks over the Christmas break, revisiting places I’ve been before, exploring places I’d like to go, and just generally running amok in the chaos. I’m intending to shoot some Super 8mm, perhaps with a view of editing it into a short documentary, but also just to document some of my experiences. There’ll probably be a tonne of black and white 35mm shots (my still image format de’jour) as well. Even whilst envisaging a holiday, I’m thinking about all the interesting, exciting things to shoot overseas.

All the while, there’s another feature length documentary on the burner – I’ve been doing a heap of research, I’ve organised some local interviews, and I’m looking at the international scope of the story with a view to travelling overseas. There’s a pair of brilliant producers behind the scenes, and we’re angling to have me do my one-man-band documentarian routine in Lithuania (!), Italy and parts of America. Nothing’s entirely sorted yet, but the wheels are definitely in motion. There’ll be more on this soon.

Vivid

Here are some medium format colour shots of John from the same shoot - got them back from the lab last week. Multiple exposures based an on experiment I shot in California last year.

Scottsdale

T is for Teacher has now also been selected by the Scottsdale International Film Festival, a prestigious major festival in Arizona, USA. This is going to be a particularly special screening, because Michelle, one of the main documentary subjects will be able to attend, along with a gaggle of other participants (students and staff at Desert Hills School). Having the film at mainstream festivals for the general public is very encouraging and satisfying. The teachers are in many ways role models to the queer community, but I'd like to think that their various hardships and triumphs have a universal resonance and shed light on the experiences of many transgendered individuals. I'm slowly beginning to think that screening queer work to an audience of queer documentary filmgoers is, in many ways, preaching to the converted. Perhaps my apathy about queer film is further coloured by a run in with queerDOC (Sydney) who (very rudely) didn't bother to email receipt of the screener, respond to correspondence, nor have the courtesy to notify me whether the film was in or out (out). They did however manage to fill my email inbox with a variety of gawdy promotion emails. It's little wonder that my interest in making queer work has completely waned. In the meantime, I guess I've a lot to be grateful for - Scottsdale and Kansas are worth a thousand niche queer documentary festivals, and I have an array of interesting (non queer) projects for the rest of 2009/10 lined up.

Exhausted

Last week I took some promo pics for a mate, musician John Lingard. We're currently wading through the 35mm proofs, but here's one of my favourates.



The next feature project (Moonlite) (more on this soon) is slowly evolving too. Tomorrow I'm shooting a promo / music video / silent film hybrid for a classical jazz artist (a paid gig, shot guerilla style on Super 8mm) and it looks like the funding for another doc is about to come through. Life is a bit chaotic atm - lots of different projects on the go, no time to rest, deadlines approaching, but loving every bloody second.