16 Gurirr Gurirr

The story of the Gurirr Gurirr tells of a woman being transported by ambulance to the Flying Doctor Service in Wyndham after a terrible car accident. She took off in the plane but died
soon after. Her spirit came back to Rover Thomas and told him of the landmarks and dreamings on her final voyage. That is the Gurirr Gurirr. Worla is the language in which the corroboree was communicated. Rover did not speak Worla and had to relay the songs to the people who could tell him what they meant. Before Rover died he passed the corroboree on to the son of that woman. This film is about that corroboree and that man. In early July 2005 he died.

15

There has seemingly been a hiatus with this blog. That is true in as far as the consistency of my entries. On the other hand it is not true in terms of what has been happening. Over the past few weeks I have been organising my film with the help of Gary Kildea. He is so clear about how to approach this work that I wish I had done this six months ago. Anyway better late than never.
What?
First I have binned all my shots in sequences. Now from these 30 unedited sequences I will spend the next month editing each one to a 4-6 minute sequence. Each of these Gary calls a brick. “You can’t eat an elephant whole” he says. Once I have the bricks I then have the material with which to build.
Sitting with Gary and discussing what worked, what didn’t and a potential beginning is the kind of guidance I needed. Making a film alone is an almighty and daunting task.

My work is cut out for me. I will probably have to defer from my official study for six months to allow me the time I need to do this edit. It is just not possible in the allocated two months I have left. On top of that I will go back to Kununurra. A recently gained AIATSIS grant enables me to revisit NW Australia twice more. The next time will be to follow up on the research thus far and discuss the filmed material with the traditional owners. A final visit will enable me to come to agreements about the conclusion of the Ph.D. project.

It is so much better now that I can upload images straight into this blog through Blogger itself. When I first tried a couple of months ago it wouldn’t work. So I had to go through Buzznet which was OK but tonight I couldn’t get Buzznet to work. The long and short of it is that it is much quicker and better without Buzznet.

iView is a great program for browsing and keeping a hold on where and what media is there however it is not for storyboarding as I previously suggested. I am using Omni Outliner to organise my sequences. That is after writting out by hand (oh no) the list.

Now I have to organise translations, transcriptions and subtitling.

There is a major written component that goes into this Ph.D however I discovered that when I tried to write and edit the film at the same time I cracked. So now I make the film first then write.