We caught up with our man, former Brown Bagger and New Zealand native, Matthew Darragh, writer and director of our latest short film 'An Ode to Love' as he headed to Melbourne Australia to present a retrospective screening of Brown Bag Films' shorts and premiere 'An Ode To Love'. Here's his account of his mini-adventure down under…

p.s. no Australians were harmed in the writing of this blog - promise!

An Ode to Love had its Australasian premiere last week at the 15th Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF).

I felt nervous stepping on the plane to Melbourne. As a New Zealander I’d grown up with a natural enmity towards Australians. A well-known Aussie star pulling out of a series I was working on at the last minute was just the latest incident in a seemingly endless line of disappointing behaviour from them. I’d heard great things about the festival though, so I took a deep breath and braced myself for whatever Australia had in store for me.

The Melbourne Animation Festival is the largest of its kind down under, with over 3000 submissions being reduced to just 100 competition films over the 7 days of screenings. The festival is held in the very spacious ACMI cinema rooms in Federation Square, which is located in the centre of Melbourne on the bank of the river Yarra. The city has a distinctly European feel to it and is seen by many as the cultural heart of Australia. The square is very lively, with galleries, live music, and crowds of school groups engaged in various drama and film courses. A free tram line just outside the square circles the inner city and the ride gives a great view of the colourful buildings and diverse inner city gardens.

The opening night of the festival on Saturday night showcased the latest Australian animated shorts, which reminded me very much of the Irish Film Board screening in Galway. Screen Australia run a funding round each year with grants of up to $150,000 Aus per film. There were some beautiful films in the screening in a range of mediums.

An Ode to Love screened in the first competition program at the festival. It was a diverse and interesting session, including a film made entirely of paper by Slovakian studio Ove Pictures. It was great to see An Ode to Love on the big screen again, to really appreciate once more all the lovely small touches that our talented crew had put into it. One of the Slovakian film makers said that it was the most beautiful animated hair she had ever seen! A small consolation perhaps for our Brown Bag Films' hair guru Ezequiel Mastrasso, who had lost most of his own hair in the strenuous quest to create the thousands of strands of virtual hair seen in the film.

Festival Director Malcolm Turner has long been a fan of Brown Bag Films' work and had programmed a special Brown Bag Films Short Film Showcase midway through the festival. It was the first Australasian screening for most of these shorts, and the cinema was sold out. The mostly Australian crowd were surprisingly well behaved throughout the screening although I found it difficult to understand their strong accents during the question session. The audience loved the films, and there seemed to be a lot of respect for the fact that a studio enjoying so much commercial success still valued its short film making.

There were a number of fascinating sessions outside of the film screenings, including a lecture by the head of a Japanese Animation School called Tama University, where some very different student films are being produced. The students spend the first two years focusing solely on visual design principles before being unleashed into animation for the last two years. A full half of the 3rd year of study is devoted to creating a 90 second film inspired by an abstract concept like a dream or a metamorphosis, with no limitations in style or narrative. The films as you can imagine are pretty wild and original.

I also had the pleasure of taking a trip out to Deakin University to visit their state of the art Motion Capture studio. Wearing a Virtual Reality head mounted display we found ourselves in a virtual dojo that we could walk around and explore. An actor hooked up with markers appeared in the dojo as a seven foot tall samurai whose action we could direct in real time. Head of dept Pete Diver had worked for Weta on a number of features and was very excited about the possibilities of this technology.

An Ode to Love was shown once more at a Meet the Filmmakers evening in the main cinema, which was followed by a premier of Signe Bowmane’s new independent feature film “Rocks in my Pockets”. After the film Signe stood up and threw rocks into the crowd. Any audience member lucky enough to catch one and survive won a free DVD of the film. Thankfully the rocks were revealed to be made of papier-mâché and the few audience members who had fled the cinema slowly filed back in. As a PR exercise it was very memorable.

The closing session was a sell out, with Don Herzfeld’s “The World of Tomorrow” winning the prize for Best of the Fest and “Grace Under water” winning the best Australian Film. 

All and all Australia was quite a confusing experience for me. No one had tried to rob me or shout out “Four more years kiwi” as they had to our nice Rugby team when they were knocked out of the World Cup in 1996. On the contrary, it seemed that everyone had gone out of their way to be generous and welcoming.  As I was about to board the plane home I had a sudden realisation that I’d left my coat with passport in it in the cafe up the corridor. I sprinted back in a panic only to find a smiling Australian waiter take it out from behind the bar where he’d put it for safe keeping. Who would have thought?

Check out the trailer for 'An Ode to Love' below: