She woke up at 10am which would mean her next nap is at 12:30, she will need proper food before the next nap and a bottle when she wakes up. She has caught the sun… no, she is sunburnt! And we feel dreadful but she always pulls her daggy sun cap off. Who wouldn’t? We can’t pick her up from childcare until after 4pm so this will be a long day for her, we will need to be contacted if she is inconsolable but only I can be called as my partner as she is in an important interview. There is extra baby formula should she need it but we suspect that we’d have arrived by this stage.
She is now crying loudly but I have to walk away and make a beeline for the Docuverse Seminar to be a techie!
My food is packed for the shoot with lots of water, gluten free snacks, gluten free bread sans lettuce… I don ’t want to be bloated or contract Salmonella.
Which tech office do I meet the crew at? There are two!
I’m presuming the one in the Communications building however, I’ve been caught out by this before, waiting for Godot at the sterile desk only to put 2 and 2 together and realise that I need to be at the other side of campus.
The scene is absurd!
We are running around like headless chickens, it’s now 10 minutes until the conference is scheduled to begin and the audio isn’t syncing with the camera, it to me looks like an internal system issue as opposed to a hardware one. But having very little experience with this particular video cam, the misconnection is as obvious as Waldo at a nudest camp.
What to do??
Extract the Zoom F8 from the equation and run the audio directly into the camera, it’s working!
After delaying the talks by 10 minutes, academic John Hughes gets up and blows our minds with his thoughts on the Vertical Cinema experience, which is essentially a video played within the aspect ratio of a tall column. It was a model taken from the first depictions of human figures carved into a rock wall somewhere near he Top End of Australia, what I didn’t realise was that I had been involved in this highly imaginative subversion of the cinematic execution as an actor a year prior in a short film that was produced by Matt Richards of the VCA. I had surmised that the premise of this film was about purgatory but I could be wrong, it was all quite esoteric, disturbing and had sunk to the deepest depths of my 2015 memory.
But what a freak out!
Here I am, filming an event that explains what I was doing back in 2015 and, if I could have engaged more with John Hughes’ speech, I could have learnt so much more. But, I was the techie, and having worked as techie in the past, I have come to understand that we are to avoid contact with the ‘talent’ and position our existence on the floor as a faceless Purot and the long chain of wheels and cogs.
…And that’s fine by me.
Purgot By Matt Richards 2015.