Well, we head closer to final pick up shots for the film and a finish line by the end of the year, which is very exciting.

Meanwhile I just finished a crazy little project; back in ’95 I was lucky enough to direct a massive Hip Hop community project called “Hip Hopera” in South West Sydney and last week I finished off a pilot project that was real Hip Hopera, a remix of Don Giovanni. I remixed Mozart and hosted the gig, Soul Beats was our MC, DJ Jay Tee (Last Kinnection) was on the wheels, Spice did the graff and Laura Scrivano was our director. Thanks to Polyopera, Opera Australia and the whole cast and crew for a great project – check the vid!

“Survival Tactics” is my first feature film. Based on a Hip Hop Theatre production, it is a journey through the struggles of the urban metropolis with bboys, Bgirls, free runners, DJs, MCs, spoken word, graffiti and street artists in Australia’s first Hip Hop feature film.

Last night in the music room at the back of the Kakadu Youth Centre when my workshops had finished I had a skype conference call with my two producers who had just returned from Cannes International Film Festival. In the middle of important details like “Will the assembly edit be ready for the next international market?”, “Where can we secure post production financing?” and “Who is the target market?” two of my students walked in. “Richie, Dylan! How you guys going?” I say.

Richie and Dylan are brothers who have the same father, a member of the local legendary saltwater reggae band, Nabarlek. I first saw Dylan yesterday in the school playground, tall, dark and 17 pulling a series of the craziest acrobatic flips as he played Aussie rules with some of the other fellas. “Awesome flips bro!” I called out “Have you seen that movie Ninja Assassin, we just watched it last night.” “Yeah, I’ve seen that one.” he replies “It’s got some good moves eh?” “Yeah, some great tricking.” “Tricking? What’s that?” Dylan asks, obviously not as a tuned to Youtube culture as I am “It’s what you are doing right now, all your flips.” “Oh..” he smiles “You mean doing backflips”.

I first met Dylan’s brother, Richie when we were recording a song in the Kakadu High School “Culture First” class. The song was about the six seasons of of the area in a mix of English and Gunwinku (one of the local languages). Richie walked in and it was obvious that he was pretty small for his age, had a bit of a limp and a slightly damaged arm, with what looked like burn marks. I could hear him rapping away as I helped some of the senior girls write their verse so I asked him to kick his piece. Richie launched into a fast paced delivery of his rhyme, picking up energy as he went, spitting out words and morphing into a freestyle with such momentum that he stood up and started swaying, suddenly reaching the peak of his ability he stopped, yelling “Aaaagh! Not that one, not that one, no good, no good!” “No way Richie,” I replied “that was wicked bro, great rapping, great stuff.” When you travel around the place you quickly see these young guys from time to time, they live, breathe and eat Hip Hop. It means so much to him, he works at it so much, holds onto it so hard, it’s his life line.

The next day, in the music room we record a song with Dylan and Richie; Dylan lays down a heavy one drop rhythm on the drum kit, then moves onto the guitar layering first a rhythm line then a sad hook line. Veronica, a local Mirrar woman, with a diva style voice that reminds me of a cross between Mary J Blige and Christine Anu, walked in and sung some gorgeous vocals over the top. Then Richie steps to the mike where he freestyles the whole song; his chorus goes “See every day I walk down the street I see my family struggling with this reality, with this money, with this grog, everybody can’t afford next feed, for their family, please, wont you help me?”.

The next day I spend five solid hours mixing the song and play it back to Richie. As it plays, he smiles and says “It’s a good one yeah, you reckon?” “Sure I say, it’s a beautiful one bro, you’re a great rapper who has something to say” “Yeah?” he says “I’ve done other songs before but this is the first one where I am talking about my childhood. I had a tough childhood you know, my mother was an alcoholic, she still is, and when I was a baby she dropped me in a fire, so I am sort of disabled now. But I don’t see myself as disabled because it has sort of given me something to fight against eh?”

My two producers and I pause our conversation, “I’m just doing a phone conference here now” I tell Richie and Dylan “OK, no worries” says Richie “we see you tomorrow and we shoot the video clip for our song yeah?” “Sure, sounds good, great work fellas, thanks, see ya tomorrow” I say and they wave goodbye. I say to my producers “Those two guys who just walked in, they are my target market.”

Film is a looooooooong process and a long time without an audience for the likes of me. While we were making the film I found myself fantasising about doing live Hip Hop shows – direct audience interaction, freestyling and improvised Bboying in the middle of the crowd. Now, when I record songs in Aboriginal communities, when I perform Hip Hop Theatre shows in high schools where half the guys are Iraqi refugees I use it as fuel to get back into the strange abstract world of film post production. I think to myself, “What would those guys think of this bit? Would they be bored now? Would they understand that edit sequence?”.

Survival Tactics started out as a Hip Hop Theatre Show; two weeks creative development with my handpicked dream team of Australian Hip Hop artists (Wire MC, Nick Power, SistaNative, Bboy Jay and Maya Jupiter) at the end of which we presented a one hour showcase. My starting point for the film was the sad and violent death of a friend and peer, Hip Hop artist and community worker, Stingray. At around the same time I knew a couple of other friends who had been randomly beaten up, one of which was lucky to survive. Suddenly, for someone who had grown up street performing on my city streets I was feeling unsafe in my own town, I was feeling anxious about the rise of ice (meth) in my community and I wanted to look behind the headlines. So to start the project I asked each of the cast to share stories where they had experienced some extreme form of violence in their life. From this pretty heavy starting point we moved back and away from those specific incidents to fill out and create characters and a world. After our initial creative development we had three months off, then went into four weeks rehearsal and a month long Australian tour of the production. That was in 2007, now it’s 2011 and last year we shot the film in four weeks and we are poised to do a week of final pickup shots in the next few months, post produce and finally release it.

At last the film will be released and people ask me “Where is it going to be on? Will it be multiplex, will it be arthouse, will it be on DVD, will it be streaming on the net?” Well, wherever we manage to get it released, I know I want to bring a copy back up here to Jabiru and sit down in the music room and show to Dylan and Richie.

“Six Seasons” Produced by Morganics Featuring Justin Cooper, Charles Cunningham, Phillip Deegan, Stefan Anderson and Richie Gymala. Video clip by Luke Mercado.

Song recorded with the co operation of West Arnhem College, Jabiru School and sponsored by Kakadu Youth Centre Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation.

One of the amazing people who was around as we shot the film was American college student Akesha Horton, who came on set to interview me about Hip Hop culture creating global citizens. She is blogging for MTVU – MTV’s University website -  and as part of that she did a video interview with me which you can watch at

Interview with Morganics from Akesha Horton on Vimeo.

When you see the film, you gotta keep an eye out for Akesha’s wonderful cameo. Much respect to her, her blog is at fulbright.mtvu.com, where you can see a pic of our lead lady, Demi Sorono, teaching a dance class from one of the scenes. Interesting note; the other journalist who interviewed me during the film was from BBC Radio 4 in London, who are doing a half hour documentary on Aboriginal Hip Hop – it felt a bit weird that two international journalists tracked me down during the filming, but no local ones, mmmm.

Hasta la proxima, peace, Morganics

The journey of a thousand steps starts with one step and with a solid 12 week timeline ahead of us, myself, editors Nick Deacon and Luke Mercado are about to start our quest to generate the first director’s cut. I read a great quote from Kubrick “Not to sound frivolous but sometimes it seems that we just shoot so that we have some footage to edit with”. It feels a little like a full circle going back almost two years to when I first started doing myself taught course on how to write a screenplay, in the last few days I have been watching and re-watching films, especially the bonus DVD stuff and getting back onto all those crazy Youtube tutorials on film making, gotta get in that headspace eh? It’s like the whole things starts again right now, so it’s time to write the first page I guess.

Meanwhile big ups to Bboy Jay, check his new page with more making of footage including some sick scratching from DJ Mathmatics.

Also, check out the new cast photos and a free downloadable pre production 45 min audio treatment of the movie.

Peace, Morganics

Last night we shot the final scene with full crew and cast, i.e., myself. First we did a scaled down crew series of guerrilla shots on trains between Redfern and Town Hall just with Ming (DOP) and Cameron (makeup). Cameron was happy to hear that when I walked through the train carriages people were pretty war of me, thinking I was a dodgy character – a sign that he had done his makeup right. Based on work I had done years ago with Urban Theatre Projects (director, Alicia Talbot) when we worked with young homeless guys who told us that one of the best ways to get a safe, warm nights sleep was to catch the train out to Bathurst and back, we basically filmed my character sleeping on trains – and jumping a few turnstyles, bit like the classic Warriors.

SPOILER ALERT! After that we shot a big scene in the movie, which I actually won’t give away. As we shot the scene with a small crane and a stunt car there were a crew of motorbike guys flying down the freeway getting chased by cops. Later on the cops dropped by to ask what we were doing and they took the chance to have a good chat to us about how they “almost caught those guys, once we got to 150 k’s an hour though we had to stop”. Without giving the scene away we got it done, shared a glass of wine and a Cuban cigar and then went home to bed at 2am.

Now, let the games begin, I am sitting with Cameron our makeup artist, “cop” and data wrangler and we are about to log all the data and begin the path of a thousand steps with one backup… to be continued.

(L to R) Nick Power, Soraya Touma, Wire MC, Demi Sorono, Morganics, Suzan Deng and Bboy Jay. Photography © Gilles V.

Right now I am regathering my strength for the next chapter. After a meeting yesterday I found myself for the first time in seven weeks with a few hours to kill, standing in the middle of Bondi Junction feeling like an alien from another planet. Excuse the extreme comparison but as my co-producer Paul Brenner said “You feel a bit shell shocked yeah?” Yep, 7 weeks of 15 hour days and all of a sudden three hours of free time seems like an eternity. It reminds me of when I used to act in theatre shows, you work really hard, rehearse, perform, tour, push yourself physically, socialise heaps and then all of a sudden it’s over and normally I would get sick three days later, but this time I am trying to avoid that – Miami Vice has been good. Shout outs to all our online team, Kimi for the graphic design and website, LC Beats for the social network and graffiti and Luke from SKB for his incredible making of video trailers!

Peace, Morganics

Monday we were filming at Dance Central and Ace Dance Studios, much thanks to them and the extras in the scenes, we had a great time, it was Demi’s first day on set too which was exciting.

Tuesday involved lots of running, jumping, chasing, falling, acting, and in my case, directing – it can get pretty tiring – all around backstreets in Marrickville. When we turned up the crew for SBS’s TV show East West 101 were setting up and we were quickly reminded of our underdog status – their catering van and equipment alone were bigger than our whole crew!  But we are operating on a different sort of level and we had some great local extras including the man, LC Beats, putting up some real graff for us. No, Survival Tactics is not a Hollywood production. Some little kids asked me the other day “Is it like Step Up?” and I jokingly replied “No. It’s more like step down.” At the core of what we are doing is real Hip Hop talent, real stories and fresh locations, those are our big production values.

Long days, long nights, the crew are doing a great job, hanging in there and we can sense that we might have something special and unique in the can. We have crossed the halfway mark so now we’ve just got to push on through to the other side.

We need extras for a couple of club scenes which we are lucky enough to be shooting at Melt Bar in the Cross – big shout out to them for their support of the project. Both days we will be shooting between 9 am and 5pm, with extras needed for approx 3 hrs, time to be confirmed. Sorry no pay, but catering is supplied. Next Tues 19th we shoot a spoken word club scene and Wed 20th we shoot a Hip Hop club scene, if you are interested/able, please drop us a line on the Facebook page.  Peace!

Check out the photos here!

Yesterday we invaded my sister’s house to film with my wonderful niece, two year old, Remy, she was a star. The whole crew worked a 14 and half hour day and they have been amazing, and we still have two and a half weeks to go. The shots are looking better than I hoped, the cast are working incredibly hard and fast, the catering is delicious, the hours are a little malicious, but we are doing the Gillard, we are moving forward. Enough reflection, tonight we shoot a big free running scene featuring Nine Lives Crew, Kamikaze and Hideboo, Friday it’s a rooftop Bboy jam, so many different crazy locations and talented artists, much thanks to all involved so far, keep checking youtube.com/survivaltacticsmovie and facebook.com/survivaltacticsmovie for making of photos and videos. Social media distro courtesy of LC Beats. Peace!

Morganics