DREAMING (BOON WURRUNG)

Bronze Spike
TitleDREAMING (BOON WURRUNG)
BrandARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE
Product / ServiceHAMER HALL RELAUNCH
CategoryA01. Animation
EntrantAIRBAG PRODUCTIONS Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
Entrant Company AIRBAG PRODUCTIONS Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
Advertising Agency AIRBAG PRODUCTIONS Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
Production Company AIRBAG PRODUCTIONS Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Credits

Name Position
Steven Nicholson Director
Thom Fraser (Lead Animator)/Peter Lowey (Animator)/Jake Winkler (Concept Artist/Animator) Animation
Johanna Rayner ProductionManager
Executive Producer: Victoria Conners-Bell/Aunty Carolyn Briggs: Boon Wurrung Elder Other Credits

Brief Explanation

The Boon Wurrung people have been taking care of this land for thousands of years. Boon Wurrung keep their knowledge of how to take care of the land and how it came about through the dreaming stories passed down through thousands of generations. The story depicted here is the oldest of them all, the creation story of Bunjil and the Flooding of the Bay.

Creative Execution

The Melbourne Art's Centre recently redeveloped the Hamer Hall - a world class orchestral concert hall. As part of that redevelopment they installed a series of unusually proportioned screens - at a ratio of approximately 7.5:1. The Art Centre commissioned us to make a series of art pieces for these screens. This piece revolves around the indigenous inhabitants of the site that the Hamer Hall now resides. What you see here forms one half of a diptych. The north bank of the Yarra River was ostensibly the territory of the Woiworrung, and the South Bank was the territory of the Boon Worrung, and so we constructed two films - one for each. This film is the creation story of the Boon Worrung. Constructing these films involved careful consultation with the various tribal groups, and extensive research. This particular dreaming story revolves around the original formation of the Port Phillip Bay around 7000 years ago. Over the intervening millenia, this oral history has taken on a dreamlike and spiritual quality. To convey that quality in the final piece, we constructed the film, one frame at a time, on a large sheet of glass. We used paint to form each frame, and photographed it with a DSLR. Ultimately these pieces were delivered mute. Here they are presented scored (and sound design) by award winning composer Julian Langdon, whose scored pieces for the re-opening of Hamer Hall.