"I just fuckin' killed Chuck!" -Chucks Murderer
Production Stills from the short film "Killing Chuck" (2012)
Director: Dean Ginsburg
Producer: James Carr
DOP: Aaron McLisky & Dean Ginburg
Starring Adrian Honner, Alys Daroy, Benjamin Hanly and I
Based on the popular comedic monologue from the stage play 'Unbearable Hotness', written by Gabriel Davis.
Art isn't ART if it isn't created by a flesh and blood person. Someone who is full of life experiences and can covey those through their art. AI has no understanding of the artistic impulse that those of us carry every day. AI never gets that spark of inspiration that we get hit with out of the blue, sometimes inconveniently. AI never ruminates over their work in the downtime nor has the motivation of creating any new art or continuing to work on a current piece. AI never sits in the room alone, committing oneself to the page each day nor endures with the ordeal of coming against the challenges that any art can sometimes present. And AI cannot express exhilaration of overcoming and completing a work of art after spending so much time on it. Neither can AI ever appreciate the work of an artist hanging in a gallery, out on the street or when scrolling through a website.
AI is vacant and anaemic. AI is designed to be ravenous, consuming what it is fed without discriminating if doing as such is right or wrong. AI has no concept of the moral and ethical consequences in its reproduction of art, yet it also harbors no desire to acquire more for its own sake. AI just follows orders, embodying our worst human traits. AI hasn't a care for what it took to complete your work, what you learned from creating that piece nor how you feel about it copying your work. Your art to an AI is reduced to algorithms, color values and stored in a database as mere statistical data - which, when summoned, is overlaid with other visual data concurrently where the mathematical makeup of your image correspond with what's entered into a text parser. Where it freely associates your work with the works of a thousand others, in infinite iterations. Mimicking, in seconds, your pencil and brush strokes, composition and color choices that you spent hours deciding on. AI will never infer the meaning of your art, it will never be impacted by it emotionally nor understand the message you want your art to send out. And finally, AI will never come to compensate you when a client chooses to use it over your art. Who ends up with a synthetic, soulless image which is indiscriminately derivative and the aggregate of meaningless pixels.
Congrats to the cast and crew of The Peculiar: Odd Tales for Odd People for your nominations of Best Director, Outstanding Drama and Best Series Premise via the New Jersey Web Fest 2021. That's pretty neat!
My sincerest thank you's to all who attended and voted at the Sydney S+S Festivals 'Hindsight 2020' Gala Finals. Our play 'Rentals' won the Peoples Choice award for Best Play and I received the Judges Award for Best Actor on the night. I cannot be more chuffed by the result.
I want to give a shout out to my director Frank Leggett, playwright Gregory Hardigan and my co-stars Danny Barton and Chris Price. You have my utmost gratitude! :)
It's the first time i've ever received an award of this type for my work as voted by my peers so it was quite humbling.
All 3 parts of my interview on 'The Convo Couch' are up!
Appearing alongside the lovely @san.koh and upcoming filmmaker @bazlehrmann, they ask me about my experiences on stage and screen. I delve into the process of working in the biz, evolving as an actor and then segue into a short chat about technology. 🎬📽️
My sincerest thanks to @bluesanyu.films and all involved, I feel honoured to have been a guest on your show. I know I have a tendency to rant but you were such cordial hosts and made it a lot of fun 😃
Enjoy! 👍
I love the minimalism of the poster and the focus on the desolation of space. All design elements in sync with one another.
Wrap on principal photography today for my short film ‘Archipelago’ 🤙
A massive thank you to everyone involved today. I’m grateful to have worked with you all 😎
Keep your lids peeled...
My friend and colleague, Danny Barton, interviewed me on his series 'Actors Making It' - You can also listen to it on your favorite podcasting platform via Anchor
The Peculiar: Odd Tales for Odd People is a new podcast series featuring strange, mysterious and offbeat stories written by Frank Leggett.
I’m featured in the double pilot episode ‘Temple Memory’, with new episodes being released each week thereafter. Subscribe via your favorite podcast channel (Spotify, Overcast, Apple Podcasts, etc etc etc...) and get listening. :)
I'm saddened to hear that casting director Susie Maizels has passed away.
Suze was one of the few trail blazers in the Australian Film & TV industry. She paved the way for so many others to be part of it. I don’t just mean actors, Suze was one of the captains of industry for Australian women in film. Her breakout movie was BMX Bandits, before going on to cast for others such as Lantana, Jindabyne, The Oyster Farmer; alongside numerous teleseries such as Always Greener, All Saints and Medivac, just to mention a couple.
In talking about her, I’ll refer to my own experiences working along side her.
Suze was one of the first casting directors I'd ever met when I started out. This was around late 2002. On the day we met, she brought me in for a go-see and the first thing I noticed was that she possessed an exuberant, infectious, positive energy. From that point on, every time I'd turn up for a casting and no matter how my day was, Suze had a knack in brightening up my mood. She had no time for negativity or insecurity during a casting. Suze was so supportive and thoughtful to everybody. The personification of “Joie de vivre”.
She was also the very first casting director who brought me in to audition for the real “meat and bones” acting jobs. I’m talking roles on TV shows and movies, not just commercials. Whenever my agent mentioned Susie’s name, it was a veritable call to arms. I'd put everything aside and do anything she’d ask of me. It felt that Suze believed in me and took my work seriously. That changed my whole perspective, not just towards her but on my responsibility to the craft of acting. That was a big deal to someone like myself who was starting out. I learned many important and invaluable lessons about the industry from her.
The last time I spoke with her was in 2012. I was taking part in a series of acting workshops for TAFTA and she happened to be one of the tutors. Suze had long since retired by that stage, only accepting a handful of jobs. She still remembered me and that infectious ebullience Susie was known for still shone. We spoke after class and I thanked her for all the wonderful opportunities she gave. I'll never forget her last words to me. It really highlights how generous a person she was.
"If I ever brought you into the office to audition for something, it's because you had a right to be there."
And with that, she hugged me and left.
You'll be missed by so many in the biz, Susie. Thank you again, you had a positive influence in my life and my career xo
From Fax Machine Films: "JULIA has been named as part of the FLICKERFEST 2021 lineup!
Come watch her world premiere this January at Bondi Pavilion.
more info coming soon"
#flickerfest2021
A huge congratulations to the production team and cast, a great Xmas present to end the year on :)
“Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world, and it’s without a signature: Chartres.
“A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations.
“Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know, it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand, choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.
“Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life. We’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced — but what of it? Go on singing.
“Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.”
~Orson Welles, “F is for Fake”
Some pretentious art-house photos on the Camelback while waiting on set. Just missing a few corgi’s by my feet and a mounted moose head on the wall 📷