Well, I thought I’d had my 15 seconds of fame after My Name In Lights at the Sydney Festival but then I became a TV star for a day!
Ten days ago I joined in John Baldessari’s art project for the Sydney Festival… he set up a large electronic display on top of the Australian Museum which displayed the names of ordinary people like me for 15 seconds at a time. It is running for 24 hours a day during the Sydney Festival so around 100,000 people will be able to see their name in lights. Mine was early at 6.02am so it was a big struggle to get up that early and walk to the museum in the half-light of morning. Bejane of Uzbekistan, Jane Dumbleton and then me Jane Richards!
Earth Hour Film Shoot
Then, a tweet to me @greeneatz asked if I could volunteer as an extra for a film shoot for the Earth Hour TV ad. The only instructions were to turn up at Fox Studios in Sydney wearing all-black with 2 pairs of black socks if possible.
The mystery was solved when I arrived, the 100 or so extras had to be ‘invisible’ to an overhead camera as we became living coloured pixels on the black floor. One pair of socks covered our hands, another our legs and we had to attach different coloured squares on our heads and arms as we became the planet earth, a lightbulb, a man on a bicycle, a grass lawn.
Every shape took a lot of rehearsal time and clever organisation by the Radical Media production company as the shapes were all animated too. And as the finished film was to be run backwards we had to do everything in reverse, including walking backwards! A clever trick though, as the reversed film shows us all appearing randomly from off-screen to make a perfectly-formed recognisable object.
Earth Hour occurs at 8.30pm on March 26th wherever you are on this earth. It asks everyone of us to switch off our lights for one hour to show commitment to bettering the planet.
“One hour in which to pause and celebrate this magnificent planet and our life on it, one hour in which to reflect on and recharge our sustainability efforts.”
