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Off-topic Rants
In this blog post we have two very special guests – first up is longtime collaborator and close friend, our amazing Director of Photography on The Wizards of Aus, the awesome Benjamin Hidalgo De la Barrera, followed by his trusty 1st Camera Assistant, the incredibly hardworking Jonathan Haynes. Enjoy!
Hello there. My name is Nick Issell, and I’m a screen writer. Feel free to be adequately impressed… Oh, you’re not impressed at all? That seems about adequate to me. Anyway… When my best buddy-boy, Michael Shanks, approached me to co-write The Wizards of Aus with him, I’ll admit, I was a little wary of the idea. The Wizards of Aus was Shanks’ baby and I was tentative to get involved. He’d been throwing around ideas for ‘the wizard thing’ (that was the concept’s profoundly creative working title) for many years. By this point I had been working with Shanks since year 11 - we’d written a number of scripts together (all lost to time, thankful), and I had been present for every episode of Doomsday Arcade. In fact, it was maybe only a few short months after Doomsday finally wrapped, that the Wizards concept first popped from Shank’s fertile brow (yuck). He even shot a few scenes. I played a Spinning Wizard. It was pretty shitty, but even so I was pretty daunted by the idea of meddling with a concept Shanks still clearly held so dear. I also wasn’t particularly interested in working on something I’d have no ownership or claim over - a glorified punch up writer. Thankfully, I was wrong to have such misgivings, and so I signed on for a job that has probably been the best one I’ve ever had.
01_nick_on_phone So an extremely talented director (Michael Shanks for those playing at home) that you’ve been working with for a very long time comes to you and says: Screen Australia have approached me to see if I want to do a web series. And I’m thinking we could do this wizard thing I’ve been kicking around for 5 or 6 years.
If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 here.
So this is pretty weird. I’m writing to you from the end of the year. THE GOD DAMN FUTURE. Well that’s what it feels like anyway. I swear I just wrote one of these end of year things only a few months back, but then I guess that’s the perfect way to describe this year. We started with our biggest project to date in January and from there the year has sped by, bringing us to a point where we find ourselves on the verge of releasing our first television series unto the world in a little over three weeks.
I shot the very first footage for The Wizards of Aus at age nineteen with a couple of my friends acting in it. Upon reviewing said footage, I thought ‘Oh, this is kinda shitty,’ and continued living my life. However, I never could quite shake the idea out of my head. The sheer lunacy of the concept rattled around in my brain, and then five years later I found myself pitching it to an alarmingly enthusiastic Screen Australia.
The most important (and neglected) aspect of directing… Firstly I want to preface everything hereafter by saying that I’m not a director with decades of experience and countless awards to my name. I’m not in super high demand and I can assure you I’m not earning the big bucks. I’m relatively new…. ‘emerging’ as we like to call it. I still have a lot to learn and a long way to go to be able to eventually make the things I want to. But I will share with you something that I feel quite strongly about through my experiences so far. Something that I have noticed is often neglected, but is without doubt the single most important tool in the director’s arsenal – blocking.
Sure the first half of the year seemed relatively quiet in comparison to previous years. But the second 6 months (ok 7 cause my mathematics when doing the last blog was way off) was when stuff got a little cray cray. Starting with a wee music video…
Just the other day after purchasing a pork roll (no chirri) from my favourite Vietnamese pork roll emporium on Smith Street, I took a moment to think about the ridiculous year that 2014 had been. In a personal sense, a company sense and just a general world sense.