From the Hills to the Heads

[Markus Nord]

Hello everyone…

This is a film that I produced during the last two years. I did all the filming during my stay in Melbourne last year and finish the editing this year. It’s an 18 minutes long doc about the waters flow from the hills above Melbourne and down to the bay and through the Heads. It’s a hard compressed file but this one is for a film competition in Sweden. If you like the film, please click on the “Rösta på filmen” to the right.
Because of lack of space I didn’t bring my tripod (I hade to bring dive gear and UW video gear), so everything is shot with shoulder cam (the On land shots anyway).

This is the link:
Reaktor Sydost

Enjoy and let me know if you like it.


Markus Nord

[Annie Haycock]

Hey Markus

This was a pleasant way for me to spend part of my lunch break. Lovely filming, though I wonder if it would have been worth hiring a tripod in Australia for the land shots.

As to the film itself, I wasn't sure what was the story you were telling. Perhaps because I don't know what "The Heads" are. You started with the rainforest, and the low rainfall - I was left expecting to hear more about the effect of the lack of water. But by the time you got to the sea, that part of the story had been completely lost. However, once in the sea, you were obviously in your element. The sequence of the octopus appearing to look over its shoulder with suspicion at the camera was great. But you seemed to go from the water to the cliffs, and back and again. Most of the film was in the sea. And eventually the Heads were mentioned again. Perhaps a diagram at the start showing how the places are linked would have helped.

For the narrative, perhaps the low rainfall could have been left out, as it wasn't really that relevant to anything else, particularly once you got to the sea. ok, so it explained the platypus being out in daylight, and the bird coming to the edge of the forest, but did that matter? Perhaps it was important to an Australian biologist who needed to know why things weren't where and how they were supposed to be. Also the fairy penguins - the narrative said the chicks waited impatiently for the adults to return with food, but somehow this did not tie in with the visuals.

Hm, this sounds overly critical, so maybe I am just trying to make the most of an excuse to avoid continuing with working on report-writing!

I did enjoy the film.