A collection of creative projects in which I have been involved. There is no specific taxonomy being used to make these various works fit categories. I will add them to the post as I locate the material.
FLIGHT CROWDS 1985
Camera: Neil Pardington
Lighting: Vivienne Smith
Sound: Gregory Brice
Sound: City Group
Figure: Rangihiroa Panoho
Research: Ron Brownson
Film Location:
http://www.ngataonga.org.nz/catalogues/moving-image-catalogue/media/flight-crowds-f38731
Reference # F38731
New Zealand Archive of Film Television and Sound
This was an early short film project that I was involved in. I was a 22 year old arts student at the time about to begin my Masters in Art History at the University of Auckland. Along with Tina Barton I worked one summer as a Research Assistant in what is now the Eric McCormack Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery. Brownson ran this resource at the time.
Two locations were used for the film. Much of the work centres on the technical effect of the various coloured gels used by Vivienne Smith to shoot intense closely cropped shots of the eye. All visually cooked up in the kitchen of Brownson’s 19th century lean to on Seafield View Terrace in Grafton, Auckland. I have still have clear memories of film for the project being stored in the fridge. The last part of the ‘Flight Crowds’ involves imagery selected from a much longer section shot in Coromandel. This outdoor location at the end of the film involved a shoot inside the Karangahake Gorge Railway tunnel (site of the original Coromandel gold rush in 1875). The light at the end is the opening of the tunnel on the overbridge that majestically sits above the Ohinemuri River. Designer/photographer Neil Pardington did the camera work. Ron Brownson was obsessively involved in both directing and organising the shoots in these two very different locations. The film premiered inside an Auckland University theatre and, fashionably, it was not well received. The reception for me felt unusual because I was the private and anonymous viewer having my eye projected enormously and so publically as a central screen motif. Long before the film finished people began throwing things. Perhaps today coins would not be today’s missile of choice for the more frugal twenty first century Kiwi student venting disapproval.
