Online

Another catastrophe and my LaCie hard drive with all the media for my film fell over and died at the place where I was about to do my online edit. That was May 2008. Now I have finally finished the film - online edit and full sound mix. It was shown at the Beeld voor Beeld Festival in Amsterdam, which I went to in June and at the Moscow Ethnographic Film Festival in September which I didn't get to.
The written part of the PhD is yet to be done. On Friday I took a turn for the better and hope to have the writing done in three months... all things going smoothly which for me is unlikely.

19 ePerformance

www.nga.gov.au/fullscreen/details/stelarc.cfm
Stelarc's "Prosthetic head is an embodied conversational agent that speaks to the person who interrogates it with real-time lip syncing and facial expressions."


ePerformance and plugins conference at UNSW
This was a well planned and thought provoking conference with some provocations, too many papers that were read (why do they do that at conferences?) and the clown act whch was the live broadcast of Johannes Birringer from Nottingham University. Apart from being underprepared Birringer had enabled the clown, camera operator, to turn the event into a farce zooming in and out, shaking the camera, twisting the camera and unwittingly commenting into the camera mic, the only mic broadcasting. This botched video conference was witnessed by the cut off audience in Sydney. Both Philip Auslander and Michael Rush delivered papers via video conferencing in an amazingly seemless and personal way where the technology was interactive. It actually worked. The technology succumbed to the ideas. The mode of delivery insisted upon by Birringer left him unaware of the monumentally bad show he constructed. Luckily for the UNSW organisers they have captured this painful experience in the archive of video conferencing for immortality. Maybe Birringer, who appears to have a good sense of humour from the way our British counterparts were laughing at what to us were inaudible jokes, should have a look when he comes to Australia in 2006.

Yuji Sone talked about Kata as the artist’s source on which to then draw inspiration in contrast to Auslanders examples of hammering a nail and musical fingerings as being examples of purely technical performance moments equally acomplished by machines as by performers. This is in opposition to the solidarity of human expression. Such binaries, I think, are not useful. What is interesting with Auslander's argument is trying to find a way to talk about technique.
Stelarc says there is no intelligence. I wonder if he differentiates technique and expression?

My thoughts about my work on instant reflection.
There is no way to integrate or cross discipline my research but perhaps I can collide or parallel viewpoints to arrive at something that while coherent is less concrete, more perplexing and challenging. In my thesis I want to use one small example from my film and write about it from different angles, not necessarily from differing disciplines. I’m thinking as an approach to try and discern technique, another to integrate a whole experience, another to focus on my position as the person filming, another to try and locate the person who was filmed and is now deceased. Is he now just sound and digitised video played back as a light source?
Death is it ... in that I would not like to make fun of the spiritual dimension in the way the Institute for the Study of Perpetual Emotion Ouiji Board Seance project approached their subject. To reduce things to networks that are scientifically observable falls short depending on a sole knowledge base used as the measuring stick.

-Yana’s suggestion to storyboard a not ethnographic film and to play on that.

- I’m thinking to use repetition, elongation, condensed moments, never ordinary speed, stills not as documents of truth but as a means to slow things down. Slow down say D&G in order to comprehend.
Argue against the death of spirit- ie. Warhol, Jamieson. That is for a society who are already dead.
The people with whom I am working are not at that point. Their ability to manifest the old people, their connections to country and all that is present through performance is very much alive.

DV and all media are tools not ends in themselves, as are all technologies.
Mastering new tools with their respective Kata’s must enable a generation of artists to produce ideas that go beyond this moment of blockage fixed on the “new” and surpass the “justifiable”.

At the end of this conference I am left feeling dissatisfied that we are still in artistic limbo with the combined effort of such a potentially powerful meeting, in a time of major structural change, not acknowledging the dissipation of practice into the ether of diminishing ARC and Australia Council grants. By engaging in this ‘liberal’ ethos we promote the downward spiral of creative potential. Is this the kind of emaciated life source we have to look forward to with artists forced into academic retreat as a means to prolonge practice? Friendly and supportive though the faces may be, is this the kind of environment required to lay the way for a fertile artsitic future or are we still eating up our past?

18

My wish here is to be descriptive about my editing process and so open a discussion that may provide an insight into what I will be writing about in my PhD.
To date that is not happening.
It’s soul destroying to have to redo work that’s lost on a computer. This is the third time in a year and hopefully the last.
Though I am inspired to work/edit by the documentary roundtable and have people waiting to help me as soon as I’ve done the work I am paralyzed by my 500G LaCie drive having corrupted itself. La Cie just replaced it, but I have lost all the media, and I now have to reinstall my film. ANU provide mass data storage where I have put all my DV material so luckily I can retrieve it. However the process is not automatic because the files loose their file types when they are stored and when they come back I will have to automate adding .mov to them all.

It is an inforced cleaning out process which makes me re-evaluate where I am at and what I’m doing. As I have just gone up to Tiger OS 10.4.2 I found the backup from Deja Vu no longer worked and I spent 2 days mucking around with other programs to try and find something reasonable and reliable to replace it with.

Having wasted the last two days on sorting out backup (and loosing some stuff with Superduper) my advice is don’t use:
ibackup
backup scripts with automator (part of Tiger)
iMsafe or
Superduper

I have gone back to Deja Vu, using the update for Tiger, which I will have to pay for in a month. It originally came free bundled with Roxio Toast 6 but now requires an update which is not free.

In the meantime I have increased the ability of my workhorse. I upped my G3 laptop to G4 status with a 550 mhz processor, added a 5400rpm 60G drive and put in a dual layer DVD burner. I can now use Final Cut Pro 4 at home. FCP4 has much better sound control. This will see me through to the end of this project.

So what am I doing?
On suspension from my PhD in order to use this unpaid time to finish my film I look forward to the luxury of $350 a week scholarship money to write the PhD when I resume.
I have been looking for work and have found some meagre channels which are hardly sustainable.
My credit card it at it’s $4000 limit so I now spend what little I have keeping that at bay.
Some WW1 research for a history writer came up and I am potentially selling coffee machines in Shopping centres- both at $20 an hour.

Back in Ngarinyin country, another of the main performers, well known for performing the argula mask, died last week. I am quite distressed by the passing away of 5 key people involved in this research project. These people were all a major part of what I am doing, thinking and feeling. The argula mask is all about death and it is really coming home to rest with me in a way I never could have imagined. It is a heavy burden living with the dead; such a major part of this cultural practice.

Lat night I was listening to Howard Morphy on AWAYE Radio National talking with Djon Mundine, Marcia Langton and others. He said that he wasn’t convinced by a remote/urban divide in the same way I have been talking about for the past two years. People who live in their country are not isolated or remote. They are at home.
Now that sounds like Michael Jackson when I think about it.
Is it my idea, is it Howard’s idea, is it an old idea or are we both taking it from someone else?

17 Documentary as Empirical Art?

Cross-Cultural Documentary: An Empirical Art

a ten day visiting scholars program

Thursday 8 - Wednesday 14 September 2005
The Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, The Australian National University

Convenors
David MacDougall and Judith MacDougall

with

Rahul Roy

The City Beautiful

2003, 78 minutes

Sunday 11 September, 7.30pm Coombs Lecture Theatre

Sunder Nagri (Beautiful City) is a small working class colony on the margins of India’s capital city, Delhi. Most families come from a community of weavers, but globalisation has brought about a gradual disintegration of their handloom tradition, and they must reinvent themselves to eke out a living. The City Beautiful is the story of two families struggling to make sense of a world which keeps pushing them to the margins.

Radha and Bal Krishan are at a critical point in their relationship. Bal Krishan is underemployed and constantly cheated. They are in disagreement about Radha going out to work, yet they always retain their ability to laugh. Shakuntla and Hira Lal hardly communicate. They live under one roof with their children but are locked in their own sense of personal tragedies.

Jouko Aaltonen

KUSUM

70 min 2000
Tuesday 13 September 7.30 pm
Old Canberra House Theatrette, Australian National University

A documentary film about the spirits, illness and recovery.
Kusum is an ordinary 14-year-old Indian girl. She lives in Delhi, goes to school and thinks about her future. Until she falls ill. Kusum stops eating, isolates herself and has severe fits of bad temper. Evil spirits have attacked the family, says Bhagat, an experienced healer. The family seeks help from western medicine but eventually turns to traditional spiritual healing under Bhagat. It's the start of a long road and the spirits are not easy opponents` What is wrong with Kusum and what heals her are questions that remain for the viewer to decide.


Bjorn Arntsens

The Fish Come with the Rain

Gary Kildea

Koriam's Law

David MacDougall

Doon School Chronicles

Judith MacDougall

The Art of Regret

http://www.anu.edu.au/culture/documentary/index.php
"The seminar was an informal gathering of 7 documentary filmmakers and 4 postgraduate students. Our aim is to explore the creative aspects of cross-cultural documentary, which we feel are all too often displaced in public discussion by an undue focus on film content and the social, historical and industrial dimensions of documentary filmmaking. We wish instead to discuss some of the principles that guide the creative choices made by documentary filmmakers working in cross-cultural contexts, from the moment of filming through the process of editing. The format of the seminar will provide for the screening of one film each day, followed by intensive discussions with the filmmaker about the intentions and decisions that went into the making of it. We hope to investigate such topics as nuances of framing, sound, rhythm, and language, among many others.

A documentary film is a cross-cultural work when it cuts across differing perspectives of ethnicity, culture, class, age or any of a number of other human categories. Most frequently, the juxtaposition is between the different backgrounds of the filmmaker and the people filmed. Cross-cultural documentaries raise specific questions for filmmakers that are not encountered in other forms of nonfiction filmmaking. Issues of cultural bias, cultural understanding, ethics, aesthetics, and interpretation will thus be among the topics taken up at the seminar."

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.

14

The day before yesterday I had the opportunity to show one and half hours of footage to David and discuss where I’m going. His questions and insight are invaluable. It seems clear now that I need to include myself as present in the film. My voice off camera asking questions is not sufficient. David suggested that I go through my written journal and choose 10 observations along the way which were key points in my journey of understanding.
On the one hand I think of theatrical issues like the difference between upper and lower body, the formal attributes of the boards and masks and the kinds of movements and gestures the masks make. There is the people’s love of wangga. Then there is the crux which is gaining a knowledge of how to feel corroborees.
Along my journey I’m asking ‘what is crucial?’
How did I become interested in these masks? What was the starting point?
The audience ought to be able to identify with my interests and I ought to be up front with intellectual questions.

Today I presented 27minutes of footage in the first meeting of the CCRs Ph.D. student film discussion group. From this showing it appeared that one of the central figures I had been working with is the best person with whom I might share the journey. This is in fact what happened on the ground. This man died last weekend in Kununurra. I feel a deep sense of loss and my thoughts drift all over the place as I review the footage of our time together.
As he is such a wonderful character and human presence I feel that it is important to keep working on his part in the film. In a celebration of his life I hope his family will be happy to see and hear his images once the period of respect has ended. I’m not sure how long that may be.

We discussed that I find my way through the film, as a participant, as my discoveries unfold in a not so coherent or smooth journey.

13

It’s not a new idea. Ten still images in which to tell a story is a preliminary task to get into film school. However it was my partner who finally said “This is enough. Stop. You need a structure. You have 1/2 an hour. Go and storyboard 10 frames to tell the whole story.”
Then do it again... five times.
So I have done three and though I have meandered off again this time I’m feel much more on track. Another two 10 frame stories in the next week as I rethink the areas I’m covering and then I’ll contemplate the five story lines I’ve proposed to see if one stands out or I should merge ideas into a final 10 frame story. This process brings up so many thoughts that I have had to stop and edit some more assemblies. Because my bin structure is not consistant or rather my logging doesn’t match my bins, the way that I have been able to figure out how to quickly view and access material is through iview. Version 1 that came bundled with Roxio Toast 5 is fast and suits my purposes for storyboarding and media management. However when my partner saw another assembly she got mad and said “just finish the 10 frames. Then you’ll have something to hang your edit on; something substantial.”
Of course she’s right but as I am learning what my material is in more detail I am starting to feel that I want to bring back footage and ideas that I’d forgotten about and felt were not a part of the project.
Think loosely act decisively... at this stage.

Having finished half this exercise I now believe that I am concentrating on four questions that I will propose at the beginning of the film:
1 What is the difference between a corroboree and a ceremony?
2 Are the people in these performances acting or being?
3 Who are the owners and what does ownership mean?
4 What are masks?

As for the new approach to back pain management. As well as a regular exercise program the issues concerning what that pain means for me continue and I am starting work on that. Sitting in front of a computer without a break for hours and the hankering for sugar are both comfort seeking, but in the long term, self destructive behaviours.

12 devil devil

This painting depicts Darrarru (Devil Devil) from the Gurirr-Gurirr ceremonial cycle.

'Darrarru' by Paddy Tjamintji. Pigment on board, late 1970s
Source: National Museum of Australia
http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/rsrch/rsrch_pp/aicn/m_act_nma.html

10 The Treatment

"So what does this pain mean to you?" asked my doctor today.
As I spoke about the injustices that made me angry I felt the pain reduce. My intention with this PhD is to get a load off my back.
For years I have felt that things are wrong. Well they are and I want to change things but in a different way to what has sparked me up.
My anger is now eating me up. As an actor it was often a driving force and anger as a survival mechanism has had it's place and value but it is also a counter productive force.

I wrote to ask the advice of an old friend who is a GP about my back pian who emailed me back

" Suggest far less time on computer. Max 5 hours a week at really good desk, really good seat –even better lying horizontal ideally week (SEVEN DAYS) with no harmful electromagnetic radiation --- turn off 100% --- //maybe gentle exercise like dancing or swimming or surfing or chantic sex.. ---- good massage----walk everywhere don’t drive."


This is the kind of thing I had been thinking although I am not quite sure what is meant by chantic sex. I suppose it's a form of singing.

My decision is to fix my back. That means cutting out on sitting at my computer for huge stretches without a break and in fact changing my whole attitude to myself, my family and my work. How can I exercise everyday and push past pain into another way of living?

9 The Prime Minister of Australia

http://www.blueoregon.com/images/johnhoward.georgebush-thumb.jpg

see http://www.blueoregon.com/elizabeth_cage/

"All countries must understand their history and their past and be candid about them. And that applies to all of us."

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, Tokyo, 20 April 2005.

8 Kalumburu mask

photo by Peter Lucich


This image, on the cover of a book by the Berndts "Aborigines of the West", is from Kalumburu and the mask came from Pt Keats. The dancer is probably Alec (Ooroomalloo) The dancer went unacknowledged by the authors who wrote elsewhere that masks

" are atypical for Aboriginal Australia. They are reported from only two areas: around Cape York, which has had contact from New Guinea via the Torres Strait islands; and Pindan, near Port Headland, also presumably as a result of outside contact. Instead of masks, then, the Aborigines have paid much attention to facial designs" (Berndt and Berndt 1965:427).

Kalumburu often goes unrecognised in the east of Australia. Recently the community was struck by cyclone Ingrid which they are recovering from while they have the much larger task of getting over 100 years of systemic problems to do with the structure of a missionary fabricated community. Whatever you think of the missionaries and their past activities Kalumburu is now in urgent need of resources and basic assistance. This week Australia's national press highlighted the federal government targeting Pt Keats or Wadeye. This designated community is considered the most disadvantaged in Australia. The problems are similar throughout a number of northern communities and Kalumburu is not atypical.

One problem in Kalumburu that constantly holds up harmonious development is that families who traditionally don't get on are all bundled together. For this reason alone it is far from an ideal community, a predicament that all missionary based towns have manufactured. All the while the strength of cultural heritages shines through and the people hold their languages and traditions dearly.

The glaring failure we must acknowledge as Australians in Pt Keats, Kalumburu and many communities in the north of Australia is that they have become places where the elderly are in peril. The media catch cry for assistance is always to do with the degradation that children often experience. They too do need attention. Both young and old deserve an attention that is sorely lacking from all quarters. By that I mean concerning health, welfare and safety. One example of this is something we rarely hear about with elderly men who worked as stockmen and gave their lives to the cattle industry who suffer from injuries caused while working on cattle stations and are neglected by everybody... and they slip painfully away.

My personal opinion:
All the traditional owners both men and women throughout the Kimberley, and for that matter the whole of Australia, who are more than 50 years of age ought to be recognised as Australia's national treasures immediately and attended to with the appropriate respect to help them live comfortable and secure lives and to enable them to maintain and pass on the knowledges they hold. That doesn't dismiss that there are also younger national treasures. It is simply to say that the older people are the ones who in any just society ought to have their basic needs fulfilled. This is fundamental not to mention that in 50 years time it will be too late for our institutions to awaken and catch up to the fact that right now traditional owners hold knowledges that are beyond the grasp of our libraries, laboratories, hospitals and lecture rooms.

My editing progress
I have been laid up for two weeks unable to edit with the death of my grandma and my ongoing bad back.
Now.
How can I edit without spending hours sitting in front of my computer? Stand up? Take regular breaks? Sure.
... and when I find the answer, which I must do to complete this task, I'll have something important to contribute to the world. In the generation of the declining back we are not spineless - just losing the support of our spines, with underdeveloped and shrinking muscles.
Oh hail 'salute to the sun', McKenzie and pilates.

7

National Native Title Tribunal: Home

6 Aussie Pride

Aussie Pride

Erving Goffman in 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' returns the ancient words of the theatre- the 'shill', 'claque', 'stick' and 'shillaber'.

"To the degree that a performance highlights the common official values of the society in which it occurs, we may look upon it, in the manner of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, as a ceremony- as an expressive rejuvenation and reaffirmation of the moral values of the community." (Goffman 1958:23)

This has me thinking. Ceremonies and ritual are not theatre. Theatre adopts aspects of ceremony and uses ritual elements but it is not either of these. Corroborees are not ceremonies either.

Cloud 5

In the air. That's where I am. Six weeks of sick leave to try and sort out a bad back. Moving house, travelling too much and being away from home, not to mention the timeframe within which I have to complete a film and thesis have led to this pause.
So I am at home in Sydney with my family laying up and trying to work out a way to accomplish this task as well as strengthening my body and soul.
The Research Centre have come good again and given me access to a G4 so i don't have the FCP problems necessitated in going back to an older version on my G3 laptop. I am lucky. No, more than that. The opportunity to do this Ph.D. is a gift which I value very highly and which drives me to finish. My supervisor, Howard Morphy, sat with me the other day looking at some footage and while I was talking about masks he observantly and diplomatically leaned me away from my tendency to say that masks are either this or that: black and white.
That is just not how things are. They may be black and white for me in a certain mood but that is far from a perspective that enables other people to enter into conversation and more than likely not a position I can hold for any length of time myself.
It is the grey area that makes life so rich and complex. The mediation between ideas is the fruit of academia. I'm no academic but I have gained a respect for an approach to learning which leaves behind my theatrical pragmatism of getting the show up and running at all costs. Such pragmatism seems to have led me to quite peculiar notions of common sense- primarily that somehow I had the best understanding of what common sense is. Now I am not so sure how common my sense has been.

Bishop Berkley formulated an exercise to demonstrate the relativity of our senses where, with 3 buckets of water, one hot, one cold and one luke warm when the left hand which has been placed in the hot and the right hand in the cold are similtaneously plunged into the luke warm, one hand will register the water to be cold while the other registers it as hot.

This is not right. I had believed it from reading the Bishops writings doing undergraduate philosophy. A few years ago when someone questioned the validity of this I did the test for myself. It didn't work at all as the Bishop wrote in his book. Perhaps because I knew what to expect there was no difference. In any case relativity is not circumvented as a state of being by the notion that the solution to the inacuracy of sensory perception is in a god who hangs out in a state of absolute and who recognises all the discrepancies of our humble senses.
On the other hand Charles Peirce does suggest that firstness is an absolute state that all humans have a certain contact with- that fundamental being. From that perception it is the personalised mediation of secondness and the socialsed mediation of thirdness that make up our understanding and life view- our common sense. So why is my view more or less deserving than anyone elses? That is precisely the point. If there are means to think about cross cultural experience by acknowledging our differences then perhaps we can aim to sense the firstness that people with dissimilar social backgrounds experience. This is what I am trying to experience and to share.

4

Today has been as long as the past few days finishing after 10pm and starting about 9am. I got feedback from Judith MacDougall today on an assembly/rough edit and it was timely. What do i need? Three shots that are essential to tell each scene. One shot that is the story per scene.
Stop with the coverage and get into communicating the lives of people, the objects they use and the way they relate to each other and the environment they are in.
In the case of the Federal court sequence it is the contrast between the use of GPS devices and electronic hearing pieces by the Court apparatus and Alan Griffiths who is the traditional owner whose knowledge of the country is by foot and which he communicates through painting, song and corroboree.
I need to think through what is crucial not just try and relay what happened while I was there.
Yes, I need to start again and find the images that hold and contrast and parallel them with the sound that must be there to tell the story.
My back is seizing up so I'm about to take time off to get that right.

3

Near Timber Creek

Somewhere in this entry I will get closer to the heart of what I am doing. This entry is a combination of my past weeks enterprise. Starting with changing a setting on Deja Vu ( the backup software) to clean up the weekly log I managed to lose my whole PhD folder. Everything was wiped and the replacement file left nothing of the previous folder. I won't go into detail how this happened but I immediately sought out a data restore program. I found Data Rescue and I could see my missing files in the demo version. Of course you have to pay the registration if you want to actually restore the files and my department advised me to use Disk Warrior and Nortons first. So I did. Disk Warrior read only the current directory and so did Norton even using unerase. In fact I think using unerase changed the capacity for Data Rescue to find my files. My department then bought the registration.
Now, running the cataloguing and content scans of Data Rescue, I can't see what I saw three days ago. Nothing works. The brunt of it is that I only lost 2 days work because I did do a manual backup earlier this week. Two days where I had surprisingly been lucid and wrote things I can't retrieve. As well as the gems I have to let go this is the second time I have done a final edit on a 7000 word article which is also lost. I spent more than a half a day on it each time. Gone again.
Don't hold onto anything is my life lesson.

My problem with backup is that I use too much memory with my media and I can't backup my system completely to the server provided by my Research Centre which allows only 1gig per person. I am about to change my whole system so that all these essential files can go there and I store my combined media separately. The reason I have not done this earlier is because I can't actually access the backup server. When I first tried to go onto the server earlier this year it didn't recognise my user password so unknowingly I tried to go in under guest instead. I was declined but at the same time I am now locked out of entering with a username and password. This is a preference somewhere in my username on my mac G3 powerbook. I know this because I can access the server by switching to another user on my computer and logging in from there. That is no use to me as I don't want to have to change everything over to the other user. My IT support at the centre have no idea where the preference is located. I need to find out...
I am at a loss to know why I have to do all this myself... but then I am also at a loss to know why so many other things are done for me. The world is a strange place where the demands that are made upon us are unrelated to the rewards and assistance that comes our way.

If this sounds as though I am going round in circles then you can feel a bit of the frustration I am going through. With such limited time to work on editing and writing I can't believe I am losing days on this.
So for the past two days I have tried to put aside the fact that my laptop, which I regard as home to all my work, has a huge memory hole in it. Instead I have concentrated on editing the footage of the Timber Creek Native Title trial that I filmed in March 2005. In this editing process I am learning something about what happened there that I didn't have time to take in while I was filming.

As I work my way through the way Alan Griffiths, the main corroboree creator/owner I have been researching with, talks about his country and acts in his country I see and hear things that I missed or didn't hear at the time. One of the reasosn for this is that I used an MP3 player in Alan's pocket and there were times when I was not able to hear what was said during the court session. As part of the first few days a lot of time was devoted to going to sacred sites to be on the land that . In my research I was fortunate to have the opportunity to film inside a Federal Court hearing where the questions and means of having those questions answered are supported by anthropologists and lawyers. Everything is rehearsed so that the types of questions which come up have been explained and discussed prior to the court hearing. I couldn't in three years come close to seeing and hearing this kind of material.
It makes me more aware, day by day, how strong Alan Griffiths and his wife Peggy are with their family, extended relations, art, custodianship of country, ceremony and corroborree.
The legal council for the Northern Territory government are following a line to try and discredit continuity of attachment by Alan and his family. The questions raised by their barrister with advice from their expert anthroplogist, in my mind only strenghten the case that Alan is the genuine custodian of a traditon which goes back a long way in this part of the world. That means in simple terms that under gadiya (European) law he and his family own the land.

I am off to finish editing the Timber Creek sequence. I have 26 minutes down from 6hrs footage. There are no issues with FCP today other than to say that it is a great tool. The new sound system is now working superbly, with Genelec speakers and an Apogee Mini-Dac preamp, since we changed it over from a USB to optical connection. Go technology.

2

Well today I got back into it. That has taken more than a week because of a new sound system put in and then days like today keep happening where it took more than half the day to organise procuring two DV decks to make backup tapes. For a supposed studio it is not user friendly because the equipment keeps moving and changing. My FCP preferences had all dissapeared with an update from FCP4 to FCP HD. That was easily solved but annoying. I just double clicked on the FCP preferences file and I was away. That was a welcome change. This is a major problem working within an institution like this. The general attitude is that PhD researchers should be helped but not made to feel too comfortable.

So today there were not the proper connecting leads (various firewire and power leads) in the studio which took time to procure. The second Sony DV deck wasn't available and then when I used the Sony PD10 camera as the player deck it wouldn't work with FCP to bring the tapes into digital files onto the G5.

Meanwhile on my G3 laptop as I use the Firefox browser... it crashes as does Word. Half way through something like this blog and bad-a-boom it's no longer there. Start again.

In the midst of all this chaos I have managed to log a couple of tapes and have decided that with the limited time I have to download the entire tapes in 41.40 min blocks then use the automatic segment function to find the shots. I can log it later back home.

How great it would be to have the time to actually think about the material rather than spend most of my time with these manic concerns. The substance is the Native Title hearing for Timber Creek.

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A plane passes overhead and I'm happy to be on the ground, at home for a moment with my partner and 23 month old son. I start this blog as an open journal to keep track over the next six months of how I edit a DVD. This DVD will make up 50% of my Ph.D. titled "Masked Corroborees of northwest Australia and the Wurnan exchange system". The approach I take is to investigate the cross cultural performance aspects that are shared in these public corroborees. There are issues of intellectual property which I will not address in this blog and I will probably not discuss the actual material for these reasons. This blog may include parts of the investigation however it is intended to focus on the thoughts and practicalities involved in the digital video edit. That is something I can discuss. I expect to be writing about Final Cut Pro(FCP) issues, sound and still image use and a lot of what I might do better with the Sony PD10x camera next time.
The day before yesterday I bit the bullet and creditcarded a LaCie 500G harddrive (Aus$840) to add to the 120G, 160G and 250G drives I use already. Because those smaller drives were full I had to work out whether I would restructure and not have immediate access to all my footage or get more memory. There appear to be two approaches to this problem with some people downloading only what they will edit, using minimal space with an edit process in choosing what to download. Then there is the way I am approaching it playing the DV tapes only twice- once to make a backup and rough log and once to download, then put them safely away. I then prefer to make DVDs to look at material rather than use VHS tapes or try and carry the harddrive around with me. That may change now I have the 500G drive.
My biggest consideration is how to manage a question of distance and computer power. I edit in a suite with G5 macs but I generally work with my old G3 laptop 500mhz at home. I have FCP3 on my laptop which travels with me everywhere. The edit suite uses FCP HD. Here is the first problem. When I go home, 300klms from the edit suite, I can't work with the material I have been editing on the G5s because with FCP you can't go backwards. You can't edit in version 4 or HD then try and open up in version 3. You can go up from V.3 but not back. Perhaps I'll install FCP 3 on the G5 and work with that till near the end of the edit.
While it is the technical aspects of this endeavour on which I focus it is the poetry in expressing the whole experience that is the direction for the Ph.D. as a written and film project.