Australian Bush
“When you walk through the Bush, you hardly ever see any animals—they tend to take cover long before you actually come anywhere near them. Like a lizard, or a wallaby, which sees you and disappears. So I decided to make a film where I’d insert them… from photographs…into footage of the Bush. To make this work physically and filmically I had to invent and construct my matte-box image shifter. I wanted the animals, the sentinels of the Bush, to appear and disappear…the Bush to be living and moving. With the image shifter I matted them in and matted them out…what they now call ‘morphing’. This film was very popular with people who didn’t know much about avant-garde film—it was easy to watch, and they could get a lot of information about the type of flora and fauna in this country.” (Paul Winkler)
Storyline
“When you walk through the Bush, you hardly ever see any animals—they tend to take cover long before you actually come anywhere near them. Like a lizard, or a wallaby, which sees you and disappears. So I decided to make a film where I’d insert them… from photographs…into footage of the Bush. To make this work physically and filmically I had to invent and construct my matte-box image shifter. I wanted the animals, the sentinels of the Bush, to appear and disappear…the Bush to be living and moving. With the image shifter I matted them in and matted them out…what they now call ‘morphing’. This film was very popular with people who didn’t know much about avant-garde film—it was easy to watch, and they could get a lot of information about the type of flora and fauna in this country.” (Paul Winkler)