I’m writing this by a fire in the Southern Highlands (I really should be recording the crackling logs) and the cold outside makes it prefect weather for enjoying Australian stories on the big and small screen.

Winter in Sydney means Film Festival time, and this year was a spectacular lineup of local and international releases that featured the work of many of our members.

I was fortunate enough to attend the opening night film, “Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line”, with a brilliant mix by ASSG Lifetime Award winner Wayne Pashley, screened in the beautiful State Theatre. The acoustics of the State and the extremely engaged audience was the perfect energy for a film about one of Australia’s most iconic bands. 

ASSG members were represented throughout the festival in all genres, right back to the 1974 Peter Weir film, “The Cars That Ate Paris”, featuring the work of Lifetime Award winners Peter Fenton and Phil Judd. The film was lovingly remastered by Glenn Butler at Spectrum Films this year.

The list of Australian productions including our awesome members (and several committee members) included:
The Cars That Ate Paris 1974, Rabbit Proof Fence, Die Bully Die, 200% Wolf, Welcome to Babel, Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line, Skategoat, Flathead, A Horse Named Winx, In Vitro, Porcelain War, The Moogai,The Pool, The Convert, Otto by Otto, The Sloth Lane.

Read about all the films and award winners on the SFF website: https://www.sff.org.au/

AI continues to be a hot topic, the Sydney Film Festival hosted a discussion panel about it this year, and various of the industry guilds are working through responses, guidelines and considerations for this burgeoning new field. In advance of planning a forum to discuss the impact on our membership we will be sending out a small survey to gauge interest and areas of concern.

The Sydney Film Festival reminded me how important it is for our industry to come together, face to face, to share our work and more importantly to laugh and share stories. The ASSG will continue to support events wherever we can, so if you want to host a gathering in your area, studio, location or cinema, get in touch! The ASSG can help with funding for transport, catering and event costs.

New sections of the ASSG website are being developed to bring more functionality and benefits to members, such as a technical specifications page where we can collate information and resources related to formats, deliverables, international standards and a glossary of terms. In addition to being a resource for our members we’d like to see the ASSG website as an educational resource for the wider industry too. And we’re working towards a section where we can collect recordings and interviews with our members – we spend all our career recording stories for others, let’s not forget to record our own stories too.

We hope you’re all busy doing the work you love on location and in studios across the country, so please keep sharing pics with us of the amazing work you’re doing.

Nigel Christensen
ASSG President