Australian Bush (1986)

“When you walk through the Bush, you hardly ever see any animals—they tend to take cover long before you actually come anywhere near them. Like a lizard, or a wallaby, which sees you and disappears. So I decided to make a film where I’d insert them… from photographs…into footage of the Bush. To make this work physically and filmically I had to invent and construct my matte-box image shifter. I wanted the animals, the sentinels of the Bush, to appear and disappear…the Bush to be living and moving. With the image shifter I matted them in and matted them out…what they now call ‘morphing’. This film was very popular with people who didn’t know much about avant-garde film—it was easy to watch, and they could get a lot of information about the type of flora and fauna in this country.” (Paul Winkler)