The vibrancy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers is arresting. 

In a room filled with some of the best paintings of all time, the Sunflowers blow them away.

Seeing them today, I can absolutely relate to the feeling of excitement that he must have felt when his good friend and colleague Gaugin was coming over to his house in Arles, that he wanted to brighten he room. 

That’s the magic of the Sunflowers. I’ve never seen the intensity of such a painting before, and it almost feels like he’s cheating or conducting some magic.

And yet there’s the twist — The brightness stems from the heavy metals that compose the paint. It’s likely that the act of creation cost the artist his sanity.

These flowers aren’t the freshly cut that adorn still life scenes aplenty. They’re old and dying… yet in the act of decay sunflowers seed and create new life.

Perhaps like Van Gogh himself, they have to go through a certain death to be reborn, realised and fully appreciated.

That one painting of simple flowers can capture the imagination of millions, fail to be recognised in its time and yet bloom to inspire the world more than a century later is nothing short of brilliant.

I was fortunate to spend 3 weeks out in Broken Hill on a production, and in my spare time I went into the outback. It’s amazing how much you lose the sky when living in an urban environment and it was really inspiring.

Given the ongoing COVID-19 plague, I thought I’d take the opportunity to capture how the businesses in Parramatta are responding to the lockdown.

Producing the key art for my new short The Snip was a really fulfilling creative challenge. And the results are really eye catching, yet fairly straightforward so I thought I should post how I was able to put these together and play around with the results.

Attention grabbing key art is also lacking from so many shorts these days, that I really hope people start to recognise just how helpful this can be in catching your audience’s attention.

Step 1

Cycle through several different ideas in the concept stage.

Step 2

Realise that Aaron Jeffrey’s behaviour in the film with his gloves is iconic.

Step 3

Try to find the appropriate blue gloves which fit your hands. Tear through several until a local burger joint has the right size. 

It probably helps if you can get it in focus.

Step 4

Create an impromptu photo studio in your living room, and experiment with lighting before eventually deciding that a large overhead soft source gives you the best overall quality of light. Use a white card behind to assist with the later selection and bounce more light into fill the shadows. 

Plenty of thumb action happening here.

Step 5

Take a bunch of photos and experience that it’s kinda difficult to align your hand and activate the shutter at the same time, but eventually come to a realisation that you have a far more flexible forearm than you knew! 

Step 6

Cut out the hand from the background.

Step 7

Make a radial gradient, then add the hand on top. Increase the contrast, then add a shadow underneath to give a sense of depth.

Add the text and then you’re done.

Finally, get carried away with the whole concept, start making motion gifs and knock out a bunch more variations on the theme.

It’s really great once you get a system in place, that you can really start knocking out a whole batch.

I was really surprised just how much the small shadow underneath the hand really made it pop and added a sense of dimensionality to the whole artwork.

Special thanks to Matt Alpass, who helped out with the original concepts for the designs, and to Seb Mrugalski who also helped out on the second shoot.

When we were in East Timor, back in 2017, our guide took us to the location of a downed Australian plane during WWII. He’d suggested that it was a helicopter that his Grandfather had witnessed crash back during WWII, but we weren’t so sure, given that helicopters weren’t really around back then.

I emailed the Australian War Memorial to see if they known anything about a helicopter, but all they replied was;

Dear Ben,

Thank you for your email to the Research Centre regarding this wreckage.

Helicopters were in their infancy during the Second World War, and only really started to be used in warfare during Korea. I can find a lot of aircraft going down in Timor or over the Timor Sea, but no helicopters. 

I hope this has been helpful. Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can assist you further.

So I’m fairly sure it was an Aussie plane because of the anglicised letters and numbers on the wreckage.

Either way it was pretty great to find it.