A collection of creative projects in which I have been involved. There is no specific taxonomy employed here to make past work fit categories. I add them as postings as I locate and process 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:
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 floorboards in the house sloping because old piling and film for the project being retreived from an empty 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 (Architecture I think) 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 leit-motif. Long before the film finished people began throwing things at it. Perhaps today coins would not be the missile of choice for the more frugal twenty first century Kiwi student venting disapproval. Perhaps they might just resort to pulling out the i phone and writing an angry review!
