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'A heart-warming exploration of India's Kalbelyas, showcasing their resilient spirit and vibrant culture'. Another 5 star review babyyy!

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Riding on a trusty Royal Enfield with two older gyspy ladies on the back, we were heading to a small village on the outskirts of Pushkar to get some illegal black market chicken as meat is banned in the holy town of Pushkar, India. However the locals wanted to cook for me and when I tried to refuse having realising we had to kill the chickens, I was told I had no choice… as is the gypsy way of not conforming! We headed back to the camp where we proceeded to cook and show me their way of life.


‘Kalbelyas of Pushkar’ really was a spur of the moment adventure I was fortunate enough to capture and it’s just been featured on Short Films Matter and given a 5 star review. Here is what they said:

In Harvey Walton’s short documentary, the rich culture and resilient community of India’s Kalbelyas, known as the Cobra Gypsies, unfold against the vibrant backdrop of Pushkar. Walton’s expert cinematography and drone photography capture the essence of these spirited people, revealing a community marked by their indomitable joy, despite facing extreme poverty, constant movement, and a lack of education and stability.

The film becomes a touching exploration of the Kalbeliyas’ way of life, portraying their warm-heartedness and welcoming spirit amidst the challenges they endure. Walton skillfully delves into the passion for dance and music that defines their identity, providing viewers with a deep appreciation for the cultural richness embedded in their daily lives.

As the camera immerses itself in the heart of this tight-knit community, the documentary paints a vivid picture of resilience and camaraderie. The film is both endearing and poignant, offering a glimpse into the beauty of the Cobra Gypsies’ existence, highlighting their ability to find happiness amid adversity. Walton’s creation emerges as a beautiful tribute to a remarkable community, encapsulating the warmth, strength, and cultural vibrancy that defines the Kalbelyas.

What a lovely message and feedback. I will be honest when I met the Kalbelyas, Lala was really kind but I feel theres a bad reputation that comes with Gypsies and traveller cultures. Initially I was on edge around them but that didn’t last long when the sea of kids came running over tugging on my hair and their general curiosity quickly made me forget about my concerns. Seeing their daily struggle puts into perspective our own cultures ‘problems’ i think we take for granted the ease of access to things like food and water, shelter and is a reminder we need to love one another and smile as much as we can. Life can be tough for everyone and thats why we need to work as one human organism! Here is the full film. Give it a watch and comment if you like.

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‘KALEIDI’ Featured on SFM 5/5

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Short Films Matter reached out to me asking if they could feature Kaleidi on their website. They rated the film 5/5 "A documentary about resilience, artistry, and the human spirit." With so much of our content lost online it’s nice to have some genuine feedback without tracking the numbers. Here is what they said:

*** ‘Kaleidi’ is a mesmerising short documentary that not only showcases the incredible craftsmanship of Russian artist Nikita Shtepa but also delves into the intriguing story behind the man himself. Directed by Harvey Walton, this film takes us on a journey through the creation of a stunning walk-in kaleidoscope in Sydney, Australia.

What sets this documentary apart is its focus on the artist’s personal journey. Born and raised in post-Soviet Khabarovsk, Far-East Russia, Shtepa’s deep-seated passion for welding and artistic expression becomes evident as he navigates the complexities of his life. His struggle with a dark period that led to his experimentation with psychedelic drugs is a raw and honest exploration of his pursuit of an alternative and liberating experience.

The film brilliantly captures Shtepa’s resilience in the face of adversity, from his mental struggles to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and his cancellation from the Vivid Sydney exhibition. It’s a testament to the human spirit and the message of never giving up on one’s dreams, no matter the obstacles.

Harvey Walton’s skillful direction and the documentary’s impeccable cinematography and post-production create a visually captivating experience. ‘Kaleidi’ is a compelling and inspirational piece that beautifully balances the artistry of Nikita Shtepa with the profound story of his life. It’s a must-see for anyone looking to be inspired and uplifted. ***

Watch the full documentary below :)

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Barunga Festival 2021

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Set in the red landscape deep within the Northern Territory of Australia, Barunga festival hosted a whole range of cultural experiences to get in tune with nature, understand the indigenous ways and in general have a bloody good time! The festival was the location where the indigenous elders wrote the treaty in 1988 which was signed by the then Prime minister Bob Hawke, but sadly never was brought before Parliament.

I attended to film for one of the sponsors, a solar energy company called 5B. Filmed with the Sony A7Siii & DJI Air 2S

A Glitch in the Matrix - Documentary review

I love a series or book that makes me ask questions in particular philosophical questions and about what consciousness truly is. At present we are trying to map the human brain which will supposedly take up around 20,000 TB when complete. As a species, we want to answer the question who am I? With 2020 being such a mad year everyone having lots of time to overthink we are now into the start of 2021 and a documentary focusing on the simulation hypothesis has come out by director Rodney Ascher. The simulation hypothesis is an interesting idea. Computer games graphically are becoming more and more realistic and computing power is exponentially growing year on year. Video games and in particular RPG, MMO games let the player create avatars and play in a CG world. It’s a great way to kill time but computer game addiction is a real thing and with many people in the world being stuck inside due to covid more and more are logging in, their lives in lockdown giving them more and more reason to keep playing. 

I’ve watched lots of videos and read books by the likes of Sam Harris & Michio Kaku RE Consciousness and simulation theory is interesting especially when you get down to a quantum level with entangled particles, only when you look at one can you know the position of the other (like the idea of Schrodinger's cat, is the cat dead or alive?) Anyway I’m no physicist but what I’m saying is the film provides absolutely no scientific evidence to back up the theory it relies on interviews with people about their experiences and reasoning behind why they believe the Matrix is real, using examples of mass shootings and joy rides (given in a stollen plane) to justify the theory but that’s the biggest problem for me, you need some kind of hard evidence whether that’s with experimentation or at least get some actual experts in instead of people that have written down some fictional ideas - dreams are not proof.

The one section I found interesting briefly flashed up was of the Mandella effect - I clearly remember in Snow White the phrase mirror mirror on the wall as opposed to ‘magic mirror’ but this was just an alteration in the Disney film when compared to the original book which my nan read to me as a child.

The film uses cheap CGI to glamourize the idea and with dramatic effect, tell the story of a mentally ill criminal, obsessed with the ‘Matrix’ film that shot both his parents in cold blood and with no further evidence of the simulation theory. The interviews had weird CGI over the interviewees to hide their identity (I assume to act as their ‘avatars’) but I found this distracting and generally the film felt like it was a shoddy attempt to discuss the topic of simulation theory to poor effect. I wasted £7.99 & 108 minutes on this. If you want some interesting watching/reading material on consciousness and simulation theory - that isn’t a glamourized pile of conspiracy theorists discussing their experiences of Déjà vu, check out the following:

Michio Kaku - The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond

Sam Harris - Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion

KURZGESAGT - Are you a simulation?

Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation?

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Nine & Nature

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**** Please note this article contains images of a dead animal (sorry Vegans!) ****

Given a gun at 5 years old and taught to hunt, Nines eye sight was unparalleled. He called me out of the kitchen about 11pm to show me a snake he had shot high up in a tree next to his house. Using his dimly lit touch I had no chance of spotting it until we hooked it out of the tree to see that it was a Python and not one of the many deadly brown snakes lurking on the farm. I met & stayed with Nine and his family while doing my farm time in Australia. Nine & Mai are from a mountain village called Kanpetlet in Myanmar and for them hunting is a way of life. Living off the land is second nature and I could hear when he was out on the prowl by the occasional crash of his gun during the night and more often in the early hours.

One day being a man of few words Nine asks if we could assist him down by the river a short distance from his house. We head over, following him through the vines crossing a small stream, as we pass a large shaded tree we notice it’s covered with thousands of butterflies all gathering and floating in a dance with each other. We continue our walk and in the leaves on the ground we see a black shadow, last nights hunt reveals a large wild bore lying motionless. Nine ties the bores legs together to a large branch and we help him carry it back to the farm where he prepares it to be frozen and used over the next few months to feed his family. Later that evening I’m outside with the other travellers and Nine appears with a huge skinned leg of the bore as a thank you for helping him to which I accepted and made jerky from! 

I wanted to give something back to Nine as we had shared his living space for the past few months and I felt almost something spiritual - the way he survived off the land, an experience far removed from my time in London and even whilst travelling in Australia. When I arrived to the farm his wife Mai had recently given birth to their baby boy and as it was just the two of them they struggled to take pictures of them all together to send home to their eagerly awaiting family. Here’s the results shot on Fujifilm X-T3 with 23 f2 & 35 f2 lenses.


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[Surf] Isolation: collaborating with fellow travellers

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Introduction

When things started going crazy in Hanoi; mandatory masks, all bars and shops closing and even all the western staff at our hostel getting fired on the spot, we thought it was time to escape the madness Corona virus had inflicted, cut our losses and head to Australia, slicing our Asia trip in half. We arrived in Sydney and made our way to Byron Bay with only 2 days before all boarders closed.

During our time in Byron, myself & Chris (@slaterrrrrrrr) met travellers in the same situation as us, we decided to commit and see what happens in Australia instead of heading home and batting down the hatches. 

Concept

Whilst playing with some photos we got chatting with Hugo (@hugopossum), a surfer keen to get some snaps of himself in action to which we agreed but instead, why not go further and make a film as both me and Chris had wanted to experiment shooting surfing and with filming in the sea. 

Collaborating with fellow travellers played such a huge role in this film as without them I very much doubt the film would have been able to happen, especially Nick who by chance had a drone in his car boot which he had collected from another job & his willing to wake up at 5am to come & film at Broken head beach.

The shoot concept was simple, a vignette on a surfer during his time in lockdown. Luckily for us this was probably the quietest Byron Bay has been in decades, this allowed us time in the ocean without disturbing the usual high volume of surfers.

Equipment

The kit for this shoot was absolutely minimal, I had my Fujifilm XT-3 with me and a couple lenses so this shoot would be about as bare bones as you could manage. The rest of the kit was borrowed from fellow travellers with a couple small purchases on a shoestring travel budget.

Full kit list

  • DiCAPac WPS3 Waterproof Case

  • Monopod purchased from local shop

  • Fujifilm XT-3 

  • 35mm f2

  • 23mm f2

  • 55-200mm f3.8-4.5 borrowed from @ebbabernbro who we met at a hostel

  • Audio was the XT-3 held close to Hugo as we interviewed him

  • DJI Phantom 4 - borrowed from Nick @Nalexandercamera 

  • Chris luckily had his MacBook Pro (FCPX)

  • Surfboard borrowed from Wakeup! Hostel to help us not drown in the sea…

Shoot

Shot over 3 mornings to catch the sunrises with pickups during the day as the underwater shots needed as much light as possible. The first two mornings we shot on Byron main beach, as were the underwater pickups. The third morning with the drone at broken head beach. The shots from the beach were simple enough stabilised with the monopod. The hardest shots were when we swam out as a team, one surfboard allowing the shooter to swap and have breaks between swimming.

Issues arose due to the current dragging us down the beach so we had to keep resetting and also the underwater ‘housing’ gave us some trouble down to the fact that the most minute amount of water left in the bag caused condensation in the bag fogging the lens due to the cold water and camera heating the bag which in turn caused some of the the shots to be  unusable. We had to leave the case out in the sun to fully dry off before continuing. 

We chose to shoot the film initially in a 4K 50 FPS F-log 8-bit .h264 mode due to being away with one small harddrive, we decided against the beautiful 10 bit for space saving and the .h265 is an intense codec to work with on older machines. Another thing to note is the fuji XT-3 isn’t a low light camera so crushing the blacks here helped to hide the noise.

We used a surf board from the hostel to help us get the idle in the water shots as this gave us a break between filming and also we could use it to push us under the water to get the UW shots, as we had no weights to hold us down. Shooting at 4k 50fps also gave us the benefit to slow the footage down giving us those dreamy UW visuals. 

We finished the shoot by interviewing Hugo, we had no audio kit so one of us held the camera close to Hugo the other interviewed with a bunch of questions we had written down. 

Edit

We chose to edit this project with FCPX mainly due to the fact the play back with the Fuji was smoother and it crashes less then PP…

After each morning we ingested media and checked everything through, we noticed the flat profile in 8 bit had some real issues with banding due to the low contrast that’s when we decided to continue shooting in the Eterna profile which seemed to mask these artefacts without too much of a grade. 

For the edit we wanted to tell a story, we didn’t just want a linear structure ( moody surfer > enters water > surf ) instead we wanted to take viewers on a journey, experience what the surfer experiences with the same amount of appreciation for nature as the surfer feels when in the water and facing the waves. We wanted to incorporate Covid-19 as it played such a huge role in us being in that location and the fact that Byron had basically turned into a ghost town of sorts, this gave us the freedom to film without any disruptions and helped form the basis of [Surf] Isolation (our nod to the world wide restrictions in place).

Once the edit was down we gave the film a look, used some luminary flares and added some film grain mainly to cover the low light noise and artefacts the camera had introduced.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, this film was a traveller collaboration as without bumping into and chatting with people in the same situation as us, this film wouldn’t exist. Opening up conversation allowed us to push the film further and make the most of the situation. Shooting on a none existent budget with minimal kit pushed us to think more about composition, story and less about which kit to use as at times, on regular shoots with gimbals, tripods and what not, this can sometimes inhibit creativity and slow the whole process down. In many ways it was refreshing to utilise the limited kit we had on hand and in future I think I’ll leave a few none essentials off the kit list! Massive thank you to everyone that was involved, please check out their linked instagrams. This was a great experience and for me, evolved into something special.  

Filming in Morocco!

In October I spent 2 weeks in Morocco filming for Nissan with the guys at Kingdom Creative. We were there to film a journalist event showcasing the Nissan Navara and part of the task required us to drive sand dunes and really put the cars through their paces. I took my A7S with me and grabbed a bunch of snaps along the way. Morocco is such an inspiring place and the people were so friendly I will definitely back and next time I will be capturing more of the milky way in time-lapse as the sky is so clear! 

FCPX MASSIVE ISSUE WITH IMPORT (FIXED)

An Issue with FCPX that seems to have gone under the radar and something I've come across recently is that; say, your doing a hand over of a project you've captured everything within FCPX creating an 'original media' folder. 

The editor I was working with (who would be editing in Premiere CC) needed me to provide him with a hard drive of the footage. On hand over we both noticed he couldn't even view the files so assumed my computer had a plug in his didn't. He didn't have FCPX on his machine and this seemed to be where the issue was. 

As it turns out. When importing in to FCPX, the software captures the files (such as .mxf from my FS7) and converts them (without warning) in to .XALG which renders them useless for any other NLE as this codec isn't recognised outside of FCPX. This is a huge Issue in that, because the footage was captured straight in to FCPX and the XQD cards were formatted having been captured and everything backed up leaving us with only the .XALG files...

Having scratched our heads and searched the net for hours nothing useful popped up so we then had to export 20 minute prores timelines out of FCPX containing all the clips. This was a long and painful work around but it was the only way we could edit outside of FCPX...

Have you ever bothered with the optimised media function in FCPX? Neither had I, but this hidden little tool transcodes all of your dirty xalg files in to beautiful Prores clips (at the cost of a ton of HDD space. This also opens up the possibility of editing and viewing the clips in other NLE programmes so even if you don't have access to the original .MXF files you are saved!