The installations at AfrikaBurn usually have quite a short lifetime and with the huge amount of effort that is put into the planning, fundraising, building and eventual burning of these art pieces, we decided quite early on that this is what we wanted our film to focus on.
Tankwa Town was our home for a total of 8 days as we formed part of The Toy Box campsite. We arrived 3 days prior to the start of the burn and found that not many of the installations were completed at this point. We spent the mornings shooting sunrises over the few installations that were completed and spent the days building geodesic domes, laying down colourful carpets and rigging lights and sound with friends and Toy Box leaders Andrew Wood and Travis Hyde.
We had no schedule as we decided to simply shoot when it felt right to do so. It was Rory’s second burn and my first and in order to experience it properly, we decided to let the festival dictate the schedule to us. Each day saw at least a few hours of shooting, except for the Friday, our only official day off, and over the 5 day festival Rory managed to shoot nearly 50 timelapses.
Unfortunately on the Saturday evening, the night of the main burn, we managed to loose a ziplock bag with 6 cards of footage. The cards contained a mass of footage, including most of the main burns and some day time installations. We spoke to everyone we could at the burn, posted all over social media and while everyone has been super helpful in getting the word out, the cards never managed to find their way back to us. We figure that someone without knowledge of what the cards were thought the bag was moop (matter out of place) and discarded it as rubbish.
While this severely affected our film we decided to put the edit out anyway. If the cards ever do turn up by some miracle, we may consider recutting the film but for now, this is our gift to all burners, especially the ones who built, burned and brought back x
Produced by Riordan Allen
Time Lapses by Rory Allen
Edited by Luke Apteker at Priest Post Production
Track:
The March – LIGHTS & MOTION themusicbed.com
Special thanks to:
Ash at Digital Depot for our backup drive digitaldepot.co.za
Ruan at Sunshine Co for the lens rental hookup sunshinecompany.co.za
To Priest Post Production for the Seven Deadly Gins and Post Production Services. priest.co.za