I’ve realised recently that I should profile some of my absurdly talented friends and colleagues. Kicking off this series is Lilian Darmono who has just done an interview with Australian Edge and talks about her aesthetic style, her life and general philosophies.

Lilian describes her own style in the interview as;

“…cute, colourful, so-sweet-it-makes-your-teeth-hurt characters/enviroment/situations, the kind that fills you with hope and positivity when you look at them, and the flipside : organic and natural forms which fills you with awe and dread at the same time.”

I love Lilian and partner-in-crime Mungo’s designs – they’re so much fun with a great sense of whimsy and I’m very much looking forward to Lilian’s short, Dusk, which we are getting a taste of in the image above.

A live music shoot that I was asked to do the other week for my friend Angela Little for her new show, Celtic Fire. The full set can be viewed here on flickr.

I’d also like to point you towards Mr Bend’s (also known as Ricky Bond – a talented photographer) photo set which has some amazing images from a little photography trip that Mungo, Rick and I went on.

Pictures from the live show by Ophelia of the Spirits the other night at The Basement in Sydney.

The world is a small place. Last year I discovered that there are two degrees of separation between me an Florian Witzel – a super smart CG guy who currently works as a technical director at the always cool New York firm, Psyop. I admire his work, which in some regards reminds me of Chris Cunningham’s work in its aesthetic, but much slicker and more refined. His portfolio has just been updated with a bunch of new clips as well as some interesting breakdowns of the construction of a few of the pieces.

Tip ‘o the hat also to Bill Murray, HG Wells and Gustav Holst.

Some fantastic photos of the Digi Toolkit (see post below) courtesy of Zoe White. You rock, Zoe!

Okay, so got back to Sydney on the Saturday night and realised that Adelaide is a very cold place. Back to work on the Monday where we started working with the cinematographers for a workshop on visual effects. It’s been a very cinematic couple of weeks, actually with the Digi Toolkit and our first look at the totally awesome in-a-nerdy-kind-of-way RED ONE camera. More in a second. But working with the cine people has been great – lots of fun. Best line of the course goes to Tania; “I’m never going to say ‘we’ll fix it in post’ ever again…” Awww…

Aaron (above) and I are currently making Marden risk his life dodging cars… just because we can! Then I played a bizarre midget while Zoe played a giant. Mungo played a bigger giant (below). It was all a bit weird, really and hopefully I’ll have some pictures soon.

Now, back to this RED ONE camera – I’ll only mention it quickly, but basically this camera will totally revolutionise the film industry and we got to see a preview of it. It’s digital, 4k resolution (that’s about 12 megapixels, at 60 frames per second) and, for a film camera, amazingly cheap (~$17,000 US). For reference, the school just bought four $30,000 cameras that do 1/4 the resolution. But the best thing? We got to see a short film by Peter Jackson that he shot on the new cameras that hasn’t been seen anywhere else other than a few shows. Very cool.

Okay, that’s enough gushing for this week.