A Busy Start to the Year

Greetings all, another year slaps me in the face and reminds me of the inevitable passing of time. I try to live in the moment, but the moments have become all so fleeting.

Anyway back to business, December was a beautiful dud, no work for Queenstown at all really, but plenty of time to relax and enjoy life. Then came January, the Korean market kicked the year in the guts with a run of jobs starting with North Face, then Merrell (the shoe brand) and a huge job for Discovery Korea, featuring lots of pretty people singing “boom de yah da, boom de yah da” while doing extreme sports and proclaiming their love for whatever particular sport they had been chosen to do. Lots of body rigs and helmet rigs for us grips and my first boot rig to get a wider angle shot of the dude on the zip line racing through the trees. It was great fun.

January was capped off with a Japanese beer TVC from Curious Film which we had to fully rehearse before the actors arrived. It was directed by a very intense Japanese lady who after 15 takes trying to get a very tricky crane shot (with the hero actress running toward camera over the riverbed) came up and grabbed my biceps and loudly proclaimed that I was very strong but also overweight. She then hugged me and made me hug the actress in an awkward three-way embrace between a 6 foot 2 grip holding a crane and two squealing 5 foot Japanese ladies. The rest of the grip crew thought it was great entertainment.

February continued the run with a cluster of jobs all doubling up, more beer with Batch Film, a last minute Joy Ride job for I don’t know what (as I was tracking a Korean family on some very cheap looking bikes down a bumpy dusty road with a stunning backdrop). My wife ended up on a rather large French project for clothing and camping gear for 10 days while I went off to Oamaru to shoot another Japanese job about a little girl in a sunflower field. So all-in-all it was a great start to the year for us.

Joe Bollinger took a lighting truck up to Banks Peninsula along with a unit crew and art to work on the Z for Zacharia adaption and are on their last week, I just read today that young Henry Aitken has hooked up with the lead actress. Scandalously juicy. That is it from me for now, I do have more but I have eaten all my word space! Cheers.

Joshua Dunn, Queenstown branch member and executive committee member