I'm building a new website - you can take sneak preview over at Wild Earth Media.

Docs Rock! - DOCNZ International Film Festival

Whetu Rere - the sea lion and the comet will soon be screening around New Zealand in the Documentary NZ International Film Festival!

The festival starts in Auckland on Thurs 26 Feb., with our first screening in Auckland on Saturday 28th Feb. and two more on 3rd and 5th of March. The Festival is then traveling to Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin over March and April. Whetu Rere is double-billed with Chance of a Lifetime (49min), a poignant award-winning film about a renowned photographer and the threatened New Zealand falcon, by filmmaker Sandy Crichton.

On the strength of the film's selection for the DOCNZ festival, Whetu Rere also received a special invitation to Reel Earth - the Aotearoa Environmental Film Festival, which will screen in 14 centres around New Zealand starting in May.

I will be attending a Question and Answer session at the DOCNZ screening at the Rialto cinemas in Newmarket, Auckland on 28 February, so hope to see you there if you're in Auckland!

Film almost there!

Just putting the finishing touches on the film, in readiness for the end of course screening this Saturday.

Whetu Rere: the sea lion and the comet made by Kat Baulu and I , is first up in the programme of six films from this year's Post Graduate Diploma in Natural History Filmmaking and Communication class.

Following it are our classmates films:

A Moment of Clarity
by Sarah Cowhey and Louise Davidson
A film about the life of a beech forest as seen through the eyes of one of its inhabitants.

Shooting to Learn
by Dwayne Fowler
A film that tracks one man's obsession and change of heart over thar.

Geckos Rock
by Julia Kelbling and Jinty MacTavish
A fascinating insight into one of NZ's least known creatures and their biggest fan.

Bluffed
by Katie McSweeney
What is really happening in Bluff to the oyster fishery?: watch and find out.

Prints of Darkness
by Mark Orton and Pip Walls
A real mystery, this is film noir in more ways than one.

Sea lion film - the website!

Here's a screenshot of the new website for "Whetu Rere - The Sea Lion and the Comet."

See a trailer, read all about the film, sea lions, the filmmakers, and our wonderful composer, Claire Cowan, at www.sealionfilm.co.nz

Whetu Rere - The Sea Lion and the Comet

At last we have a film title. As implausible as it may seem, it accurately reflects the the actual events that are documented in our film. Special thanks to Sarah White from the University of Otago Dept. of Design Studies for designing our print materials, as above.

Rough cut - screening in one month

The reason this blog may have seemed abandoned is because I've been absorbed in Final Cut Pro, editing our sea lion footage into something watchable. Here's a clip from the rough cut that shows 'Mum,' the matriarch of Otago's returning sea lions, calling to her new born pup. In the first few days of his life, Mum called the pup to her in this way a couple of times a day. The clip has raw unmixed sound, but you can hear both Mum's calls and the pup's replies.

A world view

Sometimes you can get completely absorbed in what you're doing and forget to look up and see what's going on around you. I'm taking regular bush walks to get a break from obsessing about sea lions and Final Cut Pro. But if I really want put my daily life in perspective, there are few things more inspiring than literally taking a world view. There are many sources of earth imagery on the internet now (a few are listed in the links to the right), but I find this almost real-time view of the earth utterly compelling. It's from a Japanese weather satellite 38,500km out in space, and this how our hemisphere looked this morning:


This visible light image is refreshed a few times daily, here. At night, and for a clearer view of weather patterns, an infrared image is also available here. Today, you can see a storm system that's been drenching northern NZ with torrential rain for the past few days moving off to the east.