The Gap Between The Pauses

Note: If you’re here, you were connected with Perth’s Film and Television Institute at some point. The FTI in the form that we know it, is being wound up and some of its functions are being taken over by ScreenWest. This is my idiosyncratic tribute to the FTI as it was formerly. I’m not someone who plans things. Depending on how well you know me, you might be saying “Amen to that” right about now. There was no plan to have anything to do with filmmaking when my friends and I entered our first efforts in the WA Film and Video Festival almost 35 years ago (forerunner of the WASAs). We made experimental films on Super 8 movie film; in-camera editing, falling down sand dunes, raw meat and tomato sauce representing the terrible effects of our filmic violence.   Super-8 was the cheapest type of movie film. 8 millimetres in width. You could shoot two-and a-half to three-and-a-half minutes depending on your frames-per-second. We had no money, so shot “longer” at 18 fps. Our ti...

Esteban von Disco saw his first moonbow (a nighttime rainbow) whilst dog-sledding with his family across Alaska at age 1. “It transformed me from a baby, wasting time and precious resources, into a being of sheer wondrous potential. I saw the infinite and was unafraid.” Three decades later, in March 2017, he deploys GENERIC | LOGO on all platforms, in all markets, simultaneously, osmotically and with maximum humility. As he explains, “You’re in the middle of a forest fire and the sun goes nova. And you’re like – “I get it”. Von Disco conlangs at genius level. “Sun Tzu and the Buddha, they grok me, bruh.”  Indeed, they are very much the spiritual underwriters of the GENERIC | LOGO exemplar and IPO.  Think back to the normcore era when life was basic and artisanal insecticide was not yet a thing. “I had the year from Hell,” he says” My haircut guy dies. He’s crossing the street with my lunch time ramen, his Zimmer frame gets caught in a car bumper and BOOM!” GENER...