WELL GOLLY!!

WOW...its 2019. I saw Blake had come back a yr later and add something after i stumbled upon this today, he inspired me to jot something down and to be honest maybe ill make it a regular thing to post to. I have no idea how i really got here. 2012 seems so long ago. So much has changed, friends came and went, jobs came and went. Im still working in the film and tv industry so i guess school payed off. Then again maybe it didnt because i was never really there and working most of the time. New adventures have well and truly started and been on going for me, 30 now, a family on the rise. Still happy and proud to call a bunch of you my friends, amazed we've stayed in touch. Enjoy a little vid ive made recently ..... and maybe ill be back with more if an old friend were to drop a like and comment!

out with the drone this past week

Im back baby!

HELLO SWEDEN, im Heins Hammer the gigalo with the most below. Or thats something my pornstar alter ego would say. So a new age is upon us and winter is coming. Semester 2. Unfortunately its been 3 weeks and i havent had a chance to make a single class except week 1's directing class. Poor form i know. But all wasn't a loss in my sickness. During week 3 i took on an opportunity to grab some more work under my belt. Greg Mckie took me on as his GRIP ASSIST for a weeks work on a TVC for VIRGIN AIRLINES which was produced by a Sydney company called COLLIDER FILMS.  This was a great opportunity for me to meet some great people working in the industry from the eastern states as a majority of the crew were not local. It was a tough few days out on the salt flats in Kalgoorlie but a very fun and enjoyable experience was had. 

salt lake Kal

Buggy Rig

Tracks on  the salt

First light (grip truck got in there too)

In other news i should be picking up a lot more work in the coming weeks which i shall blog about as the good news unfolds.

Also i bought a GO PRO yeow haha.

Myself Taufun & Blake

And as a final note, NFL is back woooooo. SO GO BALTIMORE RAVENS.

purple friday. Suck it Steelers fans, thats you Taufun. HAHA

RAY LEWIS

the final curtain

Well, we hit the final chapter of semester one. Laughs, cries, wets n drys. So i haven't really kept this up to date and yes i have no one to blame but me. And i could say " but ive been sooooo busy" and although it is true its just an excuse in the end. So a recap of the final few weeks is in order. So for weeks 17 and 18 i was away in Newman and Port Hedland shooting a series of safety and induction videos for BHP iron ore. THRILLING, i know. But it puts food on the table. During week 19 we had a massive turnout to directing class of 6 people WOOO. But i got to show my effort on an objective piece and got some positive feedback. Viewing the other members of the class was pretty cool because were starting to see certain styles coming out of different class mates. In our final week we shot our music video for arons crusade. Emily Calder was our Director. Everyone in the team pulled together and i believe something quite great was achieved. We managed to get all that was set out but i believe extra shooting could have been vital but with restraints on the xd disks we weren't able to and data wrangling on set wasn't aloud. Any way im gonna keep this one short since there wasn't a directing class this week. In the end semester one i believe has divided the class. People are starting to figure out were they want to stream and are discovering their strengths and weakness's. I look forward to semester 2 as i think things will be more hands on and not so theory based. Something im not very good at is paperwork. Without further ado, here's some piccys.

larga vida y prosperidad (live long and prosper)

SO I'VE BEEN A BIT SLACK

So this blog of mine that i am meant to keep up to date for class had kind of come to a screaming halt. BUT IM BACK. HEIL TO THE KING BABY!!! Or some other cult reference. Either way this could be a long one. I think it might have been a month, maybe more. Either way in recent weeks we have been covering script breakdowns, unit action, scene action, unit objective and so forth and on and on. But now were getting to the stuff that i can really get a grasp on and get stuck into a little more easily as it relates to camera a little more. I'm talking SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE camera. So the way i have come to understand it is like this:

SUBJECTIVE- is where we are looking at someone either with a close up (C/U) showing emotion or through the eyes of someone as a point of view (POV). You can only have one person in frame for it to be subjective, and we can't see many objects unless we are looking through their eyes to see what they are seeing. In the simplest way that i can put it into reading words without actually showing an example is EG. CU of John, POV john looks at his watch, CU of john thinking about what hes looking at or moving on to what hes doing next. As a rule we must cut back to the character to avoid confusion of whos POV it is. Or it becomes hard to distinguish if it is subjective or objective.

OBJECTIVE - is basically as if someone is watching from a 3rd person POV. It means that if two people are in the frame it is objective. This becomes a little confusing because some people might be like " oi Trav ya bastard, but what about dirty two shots, they show emotion when people are talking to each other?" Well don;t reach for the baseball bat yet my friends, this is objective because we see the shoulder/hair of the 2nd person. So therefore its as if the audience is a 3rd person looking on. If you are following someone from behind or looking at them from the front and their head is out of frame, this is Objective also. In my opinion its basically just don't show CU of the face or POV shots. 

For Chris's class we have been asked to shoot a short scene that has been handed out in either subjective or objective ONLY. I have chosen to do mine in an objective manner. 

So without further ramblings, boring antics and a pointless quote.

Here it is, please let us know what ya think. And more importantly, have i done it right?

Dir/Edit - Travis Davis

Dop - Sean Holyoake

I woke up this morning and thought hmmmm, im thirsty. Then it came to me that i was getting a blood test today. The next thought was i've been a bit slack these last few weeks and reality hit. I've pretty much done bugger all for tafe these last few weeks because ive been focusing on work a little more then i should. So anyway without further rambling about the shenanigans i get up to on a regular basis im going to combine WEEK 4 & WEEK 6 since i haven't done either yet and they both relate to the topic of BREAKING DOWN A SCRIPT.

What is this silly nonsense you ask, ahhh yes let me tell you, or at least pretend i know what im going on about. What is the first thing a director does when he gets a script? Burn it you say, oh no quite from it. Get money....well maybe, but its a fairly easy answer and it is the director reads it. Reads it. READS IT. And well might read it again and again and again. Untill you know it like it was your first born child. This is because you need to have a massive understanding of the script so you can start to decide what kind of STORY you want to tell. Any given script could be told in many different ways. It is the directors choice which direction you want to take. This all relates to what has been previously told to us with the THEME of the story. When breaking down a script your gonna need to chop it into scenes, and each scene must tell a story with in itself. In the scenes you need to determine the emotional and psychological feelings of the actor/s. The scene can be broken down even further into SCENE ACTION and UNIT ACTION. Scene action is the overall statement of the scene. Eg. Chris is fuming about the accusation = scene action statement. Unit action is where we determine the beats in the scene. A beat is is where the story changes within the scene or an actors emotional state changes. An example is

Unit 1) - Chris walks into the room and is fuming about the accusation

Unit 2) - Chris regrets backing down and storms out.

This scene action and unit action have all come from an outline of the scene.

"Actor walks into room, pauses for a moment. He/she looks up at the class and throws his/her pen at the table, leaves room."

 Seems pretty bland. By breaking down the script and determining the scene and unit action we have now given the outline some life and emotion. 

And now to something that will make you poke your own eyes out.....its "URBAN JUNGLE".

This master piece was created last yr about March, it stars the wonderful Terrence Hewson as an urban enthusiast. 

Directed/Written by Paris Hokin

Cam Op/s -Travis Davis & Joao Tome

Edit -Travis Davis 

Sound -Emily Calder

Starring Terrence Hewson along with Danae Blennerhassett & Paris Hokin as harpies

Week 3 of Directing. First thing monday morning, GAH hangover. But i did somehow manage to get the question we were proposed. WHY DO WE MAKE SHORT FILMS? 

My main reason for making short films, FUN. But there does come a time when you need to make money. And obviously we all want to make money out of doing the things we love. So some of the reasons why we make short films is to put into practice what we learn, experiment with no budget, try and get a profile for our selves. Something that i did learn today that i didn't expect was to make a short film to actually show what the feature film could look like, and use the short in pitches to get peoples attention.

And for ones eyeballs this week.......SPIDERS. I have this love/hate thing about spiders. There so cool and majestic some how but then there so freaky, creepy and being australia, mostly poisonous. 

 

Soooo, week 2 of Directing class, we discussed themes.
 So the question proposed to us this week is What is a THEME?  

And a theme my friends is EVERYTHING LEADS TO DEATH!!!. NO. This is wrong. That's not all i learnt. Yes i know amazing im learnading things. A theme in a film is what the directer is trying to get across to the viewer. A moral or message. And a moral premise is a one sentence description of the physical and psychological arcs of the main characters. Its basically what happens in the film, what does the hero have to overcome to achieve his goals or ultimate undoing, such as, 

Vice leads to Defeat eg. hatred leads to death/destruction

Virture leads to Success eg. selflessness/sacrifice leads to victory/happiness

And once again for ones viewing perversions....

This short vid of about a minute long was done about august maybe october last year. It doesnt really have a story and i dont know if its going to go anywhere. But myself and Terrence Hewson had camera gear for an extra night from a job we did and thought what the hell we got a night with all this gear free of charge lets smash something out. Looked pretty cool i thought.

• Cam op/Editng - Travis Davis
• Lighting/Acting - Terrence Hewson

OH....and here's a cool photo of Terry when  we went to supanova, Make up courtesy of the lovely Ashleigh Wood.