A Day At the Beach wins a World TV Award.

And then I won a World TV award.

A short film I did with my FBC TV crew called "A Day At the Beach" won the World Television Awards 2013 Science/environment category for the Best TV Programme on “Creating Ozone Safe Generations".

Now I get to present the Film at the Asia Media Summit, which is a global gathering of broadcasters from around the world, scheduled for the the 29 May in Manado, Indonesia. That's where I get presented with my award too :)

According to the website there's going to be 500 representatives from various broadcasters at the summit so it should be very interesting. 

I was so damn excited when I heard that I had won. It was 1am on a Saturday Morning and I had just finished a few hours of playing Loadout when I got the call from my Boss who had gotten an email telling him I had won. I actually just sat there kinda like "o really... awesome"

Inside though I was kinda in shock because this was my first international award, and a World TV award at that - which is pretty huge.

The film was a made as part of the workshop I had attended in Malaysia.

 As far as films go I never make anything I wouldn't watch. So when I set out to make something on Ozone Depletion one idea just jumped into my head.

After hearing all this talk about stop ozone depleting substances by the year 2050 I started thinking about what kind of effect that would have on us here in Fiji. Can Fiji or the whole Pacific wait that long? What will happen before then? or after that?

Check out the "Boom Mic"

So what came out in scripting was a ravaged Fiji in the year 2063 and the rest just fell into place.

Drawing from such things as Cormac McCarthy's The Road and even a bit of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories soon the script was locked into place.

I had a great crew working with me too so after about a week of planning and a day of shooting we  knew we had something awesome going. I'm lucky to always have a crew that sort of trusts me with concept and planing and especially direction.

I wanted to make the short informative, while still being accessible, so I had written a father and daughter reflecting on all the things that happened to Fiji for it to be the dry, barren place it was in the script.    

We shot the project down at the Sigatoka sand dunes which gave us the perfect back drop for our story.

Before the actual day of the shoot my buddy Samu Soqoyawa and I went up to the dunes to check out the location. I shot a small video of the location on my handycam just to get a feel for the place. I then cut this into a little "mood video" that I showed the crew to give them a sense of what I was trying to capture. I also used this is a site reference when scripting.

The Day of the actual was shoot was a lot harder as the area gets a lot of rain. So it meant packing equipment up now and then, sometimes in the middle of takes, so we didn't get it wet.

What was also interesting is that I had planned to have a  CGI character in the story as well. A computer that talks to the father and daughter, explaining things about the Ozone and the effects of the depletion.

The design for this A.I was pretty simple but looked great - and I owe a lot of thanks to our graphics guy and my friend David Whiteside for his designs. I'm lucky that he is a huge video game buff like me so he had a lot to draw from. In fact he designed all the graphics I animated based on a few crude sketches I had given him. though our render resources and such was pretty scarce - I thought the end product with the AI turned out great.

Lending her voice to the AI, that we named Jacki-0, was the lovely Jacqueline Speight from our very own FBC TV news desk.

The score for the short was done by our very awesome sound guy Jone Nakasamai, who actually composed the main theme a day before we submitted the film for the award.

Our two leads Peceli Rokotuivuna and Ny Vann were great sports. As we had one camera it meant we had to do a lot of multiple takes to get the different angles. Even Seremaia bui Cabecabe who was our drive for the day helped with carrying equipment up and down those mad high sand dunes.

In the end we had something we were all very proud of and to have something that is essentially a work of passion recognized with an award like this is truly amazing.  

Here's the trailer for the short - which plays on FBC TV on the 15th of May at 6:30pm. I'll have a copy online soon after I get back from Indonesia.