"TASTE OF THE TERRITORY"
SBS FOOD SHOW

In early 2015, I got a call out of the blue from the talented film maker Naina Sen, who had been working with communities in Central and Northern Australia for many years.  She had a new project to film the freshly  reformed Central Australia Women's choir and was looking for a DOP.  It was extremely short notice but we made it happen, and I met her at the airport in Alice Springs to start the journey a week later.  It was a brilliant trip, as we followed the 'one and only' conductor extraordinaire Morris Stuart who travels to remote communities to run practice sessions with small groups in remote communities, who eventually meet in Alice Springs to form the choir.  Will post video elements when they're complete, a big thanks to Naina, Morris, and Morris's wife Barb for having me along.

Although tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands, the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into swift lethal exchanges which threatened to permanently reshape highlands culture.

Bootlegged copies of the American film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use

of such weaponry. The influence of the film was so pronounced that the term Rambo is now used in Papuan dialects to describe hired mercenaries who are paid to support local combatants in violent tribal disputes. The services of Rambos were suddenly in high demand as a variety of M16s and Indonesian military weaponry found its way down the Sepik River through swap-laden smuggling routes.

In response to a critical food shortage in West Africa in 2012, I received a brief from Plan Australia that they had signed celebrity chef Manu Feildel as an ambassador, and were planning to work with him in the field in Niger.  Instead of creating event based videos I decided to design a campaign where we could stage release each part of the journey as episodes and build up buzz in line with his media schedule.  I was also lucky that my old friends at Visual Jazz agreed to build the site for free, so Plan had a full campaign at a minimum of cost.  The campaign later included online advertising and paid search, I also directed and edited a follow up with Manu in Sydney about his feelings one year on.