Update from the "Bunyip" film!

Festival Cut Complete!

Hong Kong and Beyond

Here at Team Bunyip, we've had our noses to to the grindstone, where the road hits the rubber, at the point of no return forging ahead into the great unknown and other wildly skewed metaphors. But you get the gist - it's been busy, and now it's crunch time.

August found the captains of our ship bound for Hong Kong and a week-long marathon to get the film completed before the absolute deadline of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. When we arrived, things were a bit touch-and-go.

As is so often the case on low-budget shows, many of our talented VFX team had been called away by the ever-wailing demands of reality. With the creature effects so close to complete, we held a council of war with the remaining players and agreed that completion was faintly possible if we worked around the clock. Although Miri and Denby had intended to craft the sound design and colour grade together, the enormous amount of work yet to be completed forced the terrible twosome to split up, and so ensued a week that looked like this:

Miri would depart for the studio in the morning and work during business hours with the sound design team, while Denby would arm herself against the blizzard conditions of the colour grading suite and shiver her way through the day with the legendary Austen. Come close-of-business, the team would reconvene at Stark Tower (aka Eric and Lindsay's house), where a complete takeover of the living space had occurred. Creature roars filled the halls, the home cinema (complete with actual cinema speakers, naturally) thrummed with daily viewing sessions and the kitchen table was awash with laptops, iPads, sketchbooks and endless cups of coffee.

About the time when delirium was overcoming the team, Lindsay would produce a feast of such magnificence as to ensure everyone's return the next day, and work would continue. This cycle would be complete some time around 4a.m., when the night crew would evaporate into the shadows and Miri and Denby would sink into a slumber filled with bunyips and labyrinths, until the alarm sounded a scant few hours later and it all began again.

Over the next five days, the film coalesced. Foley and music brought new drama, edit-points became invisible as sound was levelled out, the colour grade brought energy and dynamic to the scariest moments, and for the first time we heard the bunyip roar. 

All the while, Eric provided us with a one-man tech support unit that just managed to keep things afloat despite the ridiculous demands on the data side of things as we pushed sound, picture and VFX to completion simultaneously. 

In short, it was a hell of a week. The final screening at the end of the adventure was... well, you be the judge when we all sit together in the cinema. For us, it was an unforgettable career highlight and the culmination of years of toil.

It is with enormous pride and anticipation that we announce, Bunyip is finished!

We got the film uploaded by the skin of our teeth, and sent it off to TAD, where it was unfortunately beaten for a screening spot by the other Aussie horror up-and-comers Wyrmwood and The Babadook. We offer our congrats to those teams!

The 20+ festivals remaining on our hit-list represent incredible opportunities for the film to find its audience, and be showcased for distributors. Although we're disappointed not to be at TAD, we are looking forward with great anticipation to the next year in the life of the film.

But before we get too far along, we'd like to invite you to mark out January in your diaries as the month when we will screen the film in a special event for cast, crew and supporters.