backpedal I still frames
some of my favourite still frames from short film backpedal
featuring our beautiful cast: brenna harding; michael sheasby; josh McElroy; tom wilson; anni finsterer
cinematography by christopher miles.

A young woman laments her teen years, her home town and the death of a friend. Short Film written and directed by Dani Pearce. Poem written and performed by Olivia Gatwood.
Gold Cannes YDA 2019 for best Short Film under 6 mins. Cannes New Creators Showcase 2019. Ciclope Berlin Gold for New Talent.

Thrilled to announce the superb ensemble cast for BACKPEDAL:
Brenna Harding, Michael Sheasby, Josh McElroy, Tom Wilson and Anni Finsterer.
Thank you to all our crowdfunding friends and Danny Long Casting who have made this possible.

A film directed by Dani Pearce for TEDxSydney 2017 that I Exec Produced alongside Producer Julia Corcoran. A beautiful study of grief in motion. A film I am very proud of, with a Vimeo Staff pick. Dani was also selected with this film on 1.4’s ‘Cusp of Greatness Long Short List’ of Directors to watch for 2017.

What is it about this music video? Why is it so captivating from the first frame to the last? A kinetic synthesis of music, image and performance. An essence, a vibrancy, a visceral slide into another man’s energy. No wonder it took the Film Craft Grand Prix at Cannes this year (2017). Stunning!

This film has never left me, I am going to say it’s a must see, a masterpiece, nothing short of extraordinary. Klimov chose to convey Florya’s fragile conscious terrain through a study of his face in close up, a staring out at the viewer, a demand to be seen.

A haunting erotic fairy tale about Lucy (Emily Browning), a university student who agrees to participate in an exclusive service which provides unusual sexual practices, one of which is to be willingly drugged unconscious and sleep with paying customers, the only rule that must be agreed upon is that penetration is not allowed.

I love this…Jean Epstein wrote that the close-up is the soul of the camera and is fundamental to the reception of the cinematic mental space and accessing the subliminal sphere of what lies below the threshold of conscious perception.

Bazin uses the term 'asesthetic transformer' to describe receiving an idea by means of a metaphor, that there is a relay station between the scene and the image, ‘the meaning is not in the image it is in the shadow of the image projected by montage on the field of consciousness of the spectator'.

On the cinematic surface the physical bodies of the actors exist under the weight of memory, their movements, gestures, and facial expressions all reflect the mental terrain of what has gone before and are the foundation of what comes after.

I love this ad... the combination of the casting, cinematography, choreography and the music has such a beautiful symmetry to it. Superb direction. Slightly left of centre idea. A fave!

For my dissertation paper I used French Philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as a broad framework of analysis to contest the space of contemporary fairytale films. I then devised a conceptual space, ‘The Wonder Zone’ as a critical reading strategy to investigate new modes of perception in the current proliferation of fairy tale films in the digital era.

‘the boat is the perfect example of a heterotopia, it is a floating piece of space not fixed to any other space except the affinity of the sea'.
Foucault described heterotopic spaces as the ‘other space’; they are linked to reality and at the same time exist in their own reality.

The liminal place is where the crisis of the adolescent body occurs. It is the intermediate zone of the metaphorical transformation, the cinematic setting for the unreal, the mythical and the magical. It is where all the adventure and misadventure occurs.

The fairy tale narrative was created in an oral environment that has been whispered down the ages through literary and cinematic evolutions. Stories carry thousands of generations of deep wonder. The current fairy tale film trades on the hereditary value of the story sustained by an inherent narrative core that provides a platform for modern interpretations.