Shake the dust off your wings
I have long wanted to do public art. I collaborated with Melvin J Montalban and thanks to the City of Sydney and The Galeries we were successful in receiving a grant to help create art to encourage life back into Sydney city. Melvin and I have created a work called ‘Shake the Dust Off Your Wings’ which is part sculpture, part video art. The film, features Taronga Zoo’s Living Classroom’s Gouldian and Zebra finches, and captures the arrival and playful bathing of the birds.
The Galeries is at 500 George Street, Sydney and is free to the public - restaurants, book shops and retail. The artwork is nesting on the ground floor near the escalators until June 18th.
Thank you to The Galeries, City of Sydney, Taronga Zoo and Samsung for the video screens.
'Shake the dust off your wings' was filmed on the Phantom Flex ultrahigh-speed camera in 4K (this means very sharp ie 4000 pixels) at 1000 frames per second. Being fast makes it the world's best slow motion camera. I did not operate the camera as it is no ordinary camera, instead cinematographer @chrisbryanfilms was at the helm.
Unlike normal motion cameras where you hit record and keep rolling until you stop, the Phantom is different because the files are so big. The camera is continuously recording images into its memory, when it fills up it cycles back to the beginning and continues recording, constantly overwriting itself. To save footage you (or one) ’triggers’ the camera after the moment you want to capture and it saves the previous five seconds of real time. So there is a 5 second delay between what you see and what is recording…you have 5 seconds to decide. For that reason, you can miss something magical that happens in a fraction of a second. So it’s a constant juggle of deciding when to trigger and when to keep your fingers crossed.
Pulling focus on fast moving subjects is something that Chris is magnificent at. I am blown away by his skill but also his patience, kindness and dedication to capture the most incredible footage possible.
In his other work he is part human / part fish and I still don’t understand how he is alive as he films big wave surfers in the most extreme circumstances as well as capturing the most incredible underwater scenes in @davidattenborough Planet Earth series.
Melvin and I filmed ’Shake the dust off your wings’ inside Taronga Zoo’s Living Classroom or Habitat Rooms in Sydney, Australia. It was a glorious place to work. These habitat rooms were purpose built to bring wildlife and their environments to children in a classroom setting that is full of life. There are three rooms: Desert, Rainforest and Woodland. We worked in the Desert room - with red sand, flocks of birds, termite mounds and gorgeous cheeky bilbies.
Any parent, teacher or child can ask their school to book an excursion. The booking form is on the Taronga website under > education bookings > Habitat rooms.
This video shows some of footage behind the scenes.
