GetUp vs Murdoch, and a WellBeing Budget Explainer

In Feb 2020, I made a coupla vids for GetUp, two about their work to get Murdoch to stop publishing climate denial, and one about resetting the economy with a different focus, people instead of profits.

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.