ASH
Glendyn Ivin
Actress and friend Ashleigh Cummings snapped in my backyard last week. Part of a long term photographic project we are working on.
JOURNAL
The process diary of film director Glendyn Ivin
SELFIE (HIGHWAY 1, pt 3)
Glendyn Ivin
I really had to stop myself from taking photos of people taking photos of themselves. I could have spent all my time doing that and nothing else. I really don't get it.
TO MORRO (HIGHWAY 1, pt 2)
Glendyn Ivin
Three giant chimneys drew us off the highway into Morro Bay. The 'three fingers' as they are referred to by locals belong to a disused gas plant that dominates the small harbour town along side the equally impressive Morro Rock.
Was great to watch the light change from late afternoon through till dark. To watch the colours intenisfy and shadows shift. Also had some great fish taco's for dinner!
HIGHWAY 1 (pt 1)
Glendyn Ivin
Have spent the last few days road tripping from L.A to San Francisco via Highway 1. Totally. Fucking. Incredible.
The top photo is the first photo I took on the trip just north of Malibu and the bottom was taken three days later on the approach to Half Moon Bay. I'll put up a bunch of photos from the trip over the next few days /weeks.
(...bummed about the noise in the bottom image. As much as I love Leica cameras, their ISO sucks... even on the latest M240 you still have to absolutley nail the exposure at anything above ISO800 and I just missed it on this occasion... still love the shot though.)
HAPPY FOURTH!
Glendyn Ivin
My first 4th of July in the U.S was even better than I thought it would be. Nat and I ended up at a friends house in Pasadena where the Rose Bowl hosts one of the larger fireworks displays in L.A. It was a warm and very still night so when the fireworks exploded the smoke just hung in the valley air. This made the whole event even more beautiful. Huge, brightly coloured explosions were continually pumped into the massive cloud, diffusing the lights and explosions on a scale I've never seen before. It looked more like the birth of galaxies than cracker night.
Driving home across L.A from Pasadena to Venice Beach that night all of L.A was alive with fireworks. Racing along the freeway was like driving through one extended firework display. Stunning.
IF NOT HERE, THEN WHERE? (CALIFORNIA EDITION) pt1
Glendyn Ivin
LA LA
Glendyn Ivin
Spending a week in L.A then taking a casual drive up north to San Fran and beyond...
NEW
Glendyn Ivin
Welcome to the new Hoaxville. A cleaner, bigger and hopefully better place to post my work and other things that I find myself drawn to and under the influence of.
(Importing the old Hoaxville into this new skin has been a bit hit and miss, formatting falls apart here and there...)
R.I.P Mary Ellen Mark
Glendyn Ivin
Thank you for all your beautiful street photography but thank you especially for this film Streetwise. It really did change my life when I saw it all those years ago...
B&W
Glendyn Ivin
My friend Jonno leant me his beautiful Leica Monochrom camera for a couple of weeks. I'm a Leica obsessive but I've balked at the black and white only option, it just seems to limiting, but spending time with Jonno's camera, it didn't seem limiting, in fact it felt like new opportunities opened up before me. I ever so slightly started seeing the world a little differently. I had a taste of seeing a colourless world where composition, texture and tone dominate. Maybe I might have a year where I only shoot black and white...
THE BEAUTIFUL LIE
Glendyn Ivin
Halfway through shooting the first three episodes of The Beautiful Lie... Very fast and intense shooting. Reminding myself constantly what are the bare esentials I need to make the scene / sequence / story work. What's the 'essence' of the story and try and harness that. Trying to remain in the moment. Enjoying the ups and the downs. Mostly ups though!
IF NOT HERE, THEN WHERE?
Glendyn Ivin
Searching, searching...
BLOOD MOON
Glendyn Ivin
STEPHEN RAE CORE
Glendyn Ivin
Over the last few years composer Stephen Rae has created a whole world of music for me. We met on Beaconsfield and hit it off immediately and since then we have worked on both series of Puberty Blues and most recently Gallipoli. That's around 19 tv hours of drama! Along the way we have become good friends and it's a collaboration I value dearly. Stephen has just put up the soundtrack work for Puberty Blues and Gallipoli on Spotify. It's beautifully evocative work and it forms a huge part of the tone and the drama of those shows. To me the track Streams is the heart and soul of Gallipoli. Similar to the track Sea Hassle in Puberty Blues, once we found that track it seeped into every frame of the show. Even when it's not playing, I can still hear it. I need to do another entry of the process of working with Stephen because I love it so much. Essentially our approach is to write a large portion of the music first (as opposed to after the shoot during the edit). For both Gallipoli and Puberty Blues I had selections of music to work with during pre-production even before we had shot a single frame. I usually send Stephen photos I have taken of cast, locations and other details I find along the way. These help form a discussion about tone and from that Stephen creates long improvised pieces of music which I listen to throughout production, while in the office in pre and then constantly on set while shooting. For me, it's alot easier to see the images, if I know what they sound like first.
There is a great sequence of Stephen working on the Gallipoli 'collectors editions' behind the scenes and there is a great clip of Stephen working on the music for series 2 of Pubes HERE.
And I just found this sneaky iPhone clip I took of Stephen working on the first episode of Puberty Blues... such a great time.
FIRST / LAST
Glendyn Ivin
Synching up the first and and last shots of some of the great films. Surprisingly (or perhaps not) in many of the examples the first and last images sum up the entire story. It's like you really only need these two images and nothing in between to explore the ideas and the theme of the film. I also love just how beautifully enigmatic they are. Like the beginning and the end of a film is the time when you can be most poetic, lulling the audience in and out of the experience...
Thank you Jacob T Sweeney for taking the time... I could have watched a whole feature length of just these moments...
Full list of films below...
What can we learn by examining only the first and final shot of a film? This video plays the opening and closing shots of 55 films side-by-side. Some of the opening shots are strikingly similar to the final shots, while others are vastly different--both serving a purpose in communicating various themes. Some show progress, some show decline, and some are simply impactful images used to begin and end a film. MUSIC: "Any Other Name" by Thomas Newman Films used (in order of appearance): The Tree of Life 00:00 The Master 00:09 Brokeback Mountain 00:15 No Country for Old Men 00:23 Her 00:27 Blue Valentine 00:30 Birdman 00:34 Black Swan 00:41 Gone Girl 00:47 Kill Bill Vol. 2 00:53 Punch-Drunk Love 00:59 Silver Linings Playbook 01:06 Taxi Driver 01:11 Shutter Island 01:20 Children of Men 01:27 We Need to Talk About Kevin 01:33 Funny Games (2007) 01:41 Fight Club 01:47 12 Years a Slave 01:54 There Will be Blood 01:59 The Godfather Part II 02:05 Shame 02:10 Never Let Me Go 02:17 The Road 02:21 Hunger 02:27 Raging Bull 02:31 Cabaret 02:36 Before Sunrise 02:42 Nebraska 02:47 Frank 02:54 Cast Away 03:01 Somewhere 03:06 Melancholia 03:11 Morvern Callar 03:18 Take this Waltz 03:21 Buried 03:25 Lord of War 03:32 Cape Fear 03:38 12 Monkeys 03:45 The World According to Garp 03:50 Saving Private Ryan 03:57 Poetry 04:02 Solaris (1972) 04:05 Dr. Strangelove 04:11 The Astronaut Farmer 04:16 The Piano 04:21 Inception 04:26 Boyhood 04:31 Whiplash 04:37 Cloud Atlas 04:43 Under the Skin 04:47 2001: A Space Odyssey 04:51 Gravity 04:57 The Searchers 05:03 The Usual Suspects 05:23
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