Turtles, Mantas and Sharks

This is some footage I shot (with a great deal of help from the wonderful Ben Stiel) in Indonesia in January this year. Of course it feels like a few lifetimes ago now.

We shot it in Komodo National Park, well, underwater there, just off the Eastern tip of Flores.

Ben and I had never been diving before, but we did our beginners' course in Bali, then our advanced course in Flores, before diving for 3 days straight off a dive boat, that allowed us to find all the life you see in the video. Unfortunately the last day of the trip I fell on the boat and broke my shoulder blade, but luckily Ben picked up the camera and continued filming underwater the rest of the day.

I hope you like the footage, it was one of the most magical experiences of my life filming it. Finally, I had been filming the Great Barrier Reef in December 2019, a month beforehand, and we hadn't found anything like what I found in Indonesia. In fact what I saw of the Great Barrier Reef was scary, as it was so damaged and degraded. The reef has been devastated both by extreme weather (e.g. Cyclone Debbie) and bleaching events (at least the sections near Airlie Beach that I saw). Increasing intensity of extreme weather events and increasing temperatures that lead to bleaching are both caused by climate change (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/c..., https://www.marineconservation.org.au...).

If we want to protect the kind of life that you can see in this video, we have to stop polluting our air and oceans, we need to use renewable energy and put life on our planet before profit.

Chris in Ghana

So this short profile piece was commissioned by the NCD Alliance (NCD means non-communicable disease - things like diabetes, obesity, cancer, things you can't pass on), in late 2019.

It was the first time I'd ever been to Ghana, I mean I don't know Africa well, I'd been to Nigeria for a couple of days in 2017 to make a previous similar piece for the NCD Alliance, and other just been to Morocco for one day. (That day/night in Tangiers was amazing mind you, I'd tried to go back in 2017 with Filmmakers Without Borders, but the paperwork hadn't gone through in time, that's actually how I ended up in Bhutan).

Anyway, I digress a lot. I met Chris, and another guy named Labram, and both of these guys were amazing, as you can tell in Chris' case by watching the vid.

What a guy, such energy, passion, charisma. I'm a big fan of Chris. He has an amazing voice right. He doesn't go into it in the film, but he previously worked in radio and when I was there he was trying to get back in.

I hope he manages it, I hope to stay in touch with him and to see him again. The way he was living, in that one concrete room in the dark, him and his mum squeezed in there. It's the roughest living conditions of anyone I've met to be honest.

Keep up the good work Chris, you're a star.

Dirty Power

I made this while I was at Greenpeace in the first half of 2019, working closely with Chris Phillips, an amazingly talented filmmaker, and Nicola Casule, head of Research and Investigations at Greenpeace.

I'd had the idea to investigate the links between the coal industry and the government for a long time, but hadn't been able to get the project off the ground. It just seemed clear to me that there must be a lot of connections between the two, why else would the coal industry hold so much sway over government policy?

Eventually it was clear Nicola felt the same way, so he commissioned Michael West, a well-known investigative journalist, to start the research and we got underway. I brought Chris onboard as I knew he'd be able to create visuals that would do the story justice.

It helped that Michael was already investigating this kind of thing, in fact he had been doing so for years, so he kept at it and I started working on a script that would bring the research together into a coherent narrative, and Chris started work on the design.

Although lacking new revelations for the first time this film shone a light onto the network of people closely connecting the three most powerful pillars of conservative Australian power; the coal industry, the Coalition and the Murdoch Press.

By the time I left Greenpeace in June 2019 the film had the best engagement stats of any Greenpeace video, and at present has over 500,000 views on facebook.