Locations #1

I heard a whisper about a particular location - an old hotel that had been left abandoned and had now become a skate spot and a squat - at around the time I was asked to do a clip for a Melbourne band, Red Ink. It took a while between the band and me to find out exactly where and what the details were of this hotel. One afternoon, we received three calls from pool skaters who told us about it. I snuck in later that afternoon and took some initial photos. The location was incredible. Hotel rooms, left completely intact, had been trashed. Televisions thrown from second floor windows, beds upended, blankets used to mop the pool. Some rooms were clearly being used as shoot up retreats. Others had elaborate new graff covering the walls. The reception had been destroyed, brochure carriages tipped over and scattered amid broken glass. It was, it seemed, an entirely art directed post-cataclysmic set. Too good to be true. So, we shot the hell out of it with a good old fashioned music video... T is frantically rewriting a script so that we can potentially shoot a fiction flick in there before it is completely demolished.

Here are some stills from the clip as shot by Stefan Duscio.









The band were very generous in indulging my shameless romanticism and allowing me to weave in a character subplot - beautifully performed by Peter McKew and Allie Webb - but it was intriguing to see how much the location shaped and 'made natural' all the performances, of extras and band alike.

This is the clip: