The 3 latest videos appearing on the site today, bring the total to over 250. I have done the shot-selection for another 30 which Steve and I will be working our way through.
For the first time since 29 July, due to my overseas trip and a combination of personal arrangements affecting Steve and me, we were only able to manage a working session this evening. We captured 90 frames, all but a few from the two most recent HD tapes, bringing the record up to date, except that I am well advanced on the next tape. We also put together 5 new videos.
Nearly two years after I handed over the grant-funded data files of my unedited footage to the State Library, and nine months since I at last received the Deed of Gift duly signed by a library official, I today delivered the data files and DVDs of HD tapes 67-80 funded by me. This means that the library now has the complete footage. I put down my reduced yearly output to a combination of creating 111 species videos, website travails, time away from home on trips and the fact that I was without my camera for 3 months last Summer.
Worked with Steve on new tapes and he confirmed that he had sent the final data file to Showrunner Productions in Perth, following succesive email requests to use my footage for their ’72 Dangerous Animals Australia’ series to be shown by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Showrunner requested my ‘Giant Centipede’, ‘Paralysis Tick’, ‘Stephen’s Banded Snake’ and ‘Grey-headed Flying Foxes’ vimeo footage.
Peter Hendry sent me an email on June 28 with the first Pancam ID, a small moth from a photo I sent him. Having emailed Chris Burwell with ID requests for a Pancam photo and 2 video frames on the 25th, I phoned him today regarding identification for a species video of an Earwig I filmed two years ago and he gave me information about the subjects in my email. I thought one subject was a Shield Bug and one a kind of Lady Beetle. The Shield Bug turned out to be a Soapberry Bug and the Lady Beetle an unidentified Shield Bug nymph.
This evening Steve downloaded the first video clips and photos from the Panasonic to his hard drive. We added photos and selected video frames for capture to Stills 18. I then deleted everything from the card and am awaiting a DVD from Steve with all the material from the download.
In thanking Leigh Winsor for confirming the identity of a Flatworm, footage of which comprises a forthcoming video, I made the point that whenever I film a lone individual of a species I have not seen before, I tend to think that there is bound to be another specimen somewhere, but where is that somewhere, I wonder. Which leads me to thinking about what the mountain’s population of a given species might be. How many Rainbow Lorikeets, which are plentiful, for instance, or Great-barred Frogs, of which we see many at night. The mean range across Australia of Short-beaked Echidnas is 40-60 ha. The one I filmed in the Knoll National Park could have been one of a pair or three, given the park’s roughly 127 ha area. The White-banded Noctuid Moth was the first spectacular moth I filmed. I did not see another for several years. Then I started to see them regularly and once filmed a group of 4 on the Central Avenue garage.
Following our telephone conversation last week, I emailed Simon Smith of the National Film and Sound Archive today, summarising our discussion regarding providing data files of our Vimeo uploads for the 5 ½ years to the end of 2014. The NFSA has all my edited and scripted content. The vimeo footage is edited for visuals and sound. Much of the material will be new to the NFSA. I currently have 203 videos on Vimeo and have compiled an additional 14 which Steve and I will be working on next week and beyond.
An email from Chris Taylor, who is based at Curtin University in Perth, arrived which confirmed that a frame I sent him yesterday was of a different Harvestman to the one he identified a couple of years ago. I filmed it in October 2013. He was only able to identify the family and pointed out that the group is long overdue a revision.
As flagged in my 8 April post, Steve and I completed work on Hugh’s video frames. So today I sent out the newsletter informing subscribers that the frames had been added to the AERIAL 2001 album. The views tend to focus on the escarpment with its gorges and shelf land, rather than on the plateau which are the main focus of Hugh’s aerial photos.