You Know You Got Soul

A bit battered and broken, we're back in the edit suite working on the feature doc after the madness of a music video shoot along the New South Wales coast line around Nambucca Heads. After flying into Sydney at dawn on the Monday, picking up our gear, lighting rig and generators, we drove up the coast arriving at dusk for a last minute lighting recce. Then, Tuesday was spent furiously driving from rainforest to clifftop, township to dusty road to hillside to wheatfield, locking in a dozen locations, a vintage car, hilltop farmhouse, movement, schedule and shotlisting, all from first looks at the environment and surrounds for a dawn shoot the next day. Then, over the following two days, in our usual fashion, we had a sweaty DIY hoe-down with T directing action, art directing and production managing, me directing shots, data wrangling, gaffing and gripping and Katie Milwright lighting, shooting and doing everything else in between. Huge thanks to Emma Donovan and her manager Vicky Gordon for their patience, to all the local mob around Nambucca who acted in scenes, loaned houses, cars and backyards.

This is our first soul clip. Although I was always a little indie punk kid, I have the hugest, weakest, secret soft spot for soul music and so it was a beautiful thing to be able to make a clip with Emma Donovan who has one of the best soul voices in the country. It was also a nice reminder to spend more time on the screenplay I have been dribbling over; a black comedy about a hopeless, dope addled, single dad whose one escape from his three sons who are, variously, a teenage Nazi, adultering apprentice baker and horny, hyper competitive nerd, is his nightly spot as a soul DJ on the local community radio station.

And, so: with all that downloaded into the strange, silent abyss of the online blog, here are some screen shots from the 5Dmk2 rushes lensed by Ms Katie Milwright. I'm particularly digging on the first shot - from a scene in a phone booth on the remote Scotts Head beach - which reminds me of an old favourite image by Rachael Cassells: