living, breathing, dancing...: Rainbow Valley

The initial idea was for us to film and take photos for the latest Tourism Australia international ad campaign at Rainbow Valley last weekend but rain in the central desert forced the producers to delay the shoot. There was even a suggestion that the shoot would be moved to Uluru but the claypans of the valley had sufficiently dried out for us to proceed.

Which turned out to be a good thing. For no matter how spectacular the big red rock is, I’m glad we ended up coming to Rainbow Valley. With the expansive flatness of the cracked white claypans, it was an incredibly dramatic view and I guess it would have been far more preferable to be dancing on the soft white clay than the rough red dirt of Uluru. And the large sandstone formation had its own lighting tricks that, especially at dusk, would take our breath away.

Getting there was an ordeal, though. A three-hour flight from Sydney was followed by a bus trip that ended on a deafeningly rough stretch of dirt road. Every part of the bus rattled so noisily, and we were bouncing around in our seats. I again suffered from sinus problems from the aircraft’s air-conditioning and Telfast has simply stopped working two or three pills ago. But finally we spied what looked like a terrific bite out of the worn-down sandstone hills, which made the agony of travelling all worth it in the end. Interestingly enough it’s the less dramatic-looking hill to the south-east of the big bite that is the sacred site though there are some rocks around the main geological feature that are off-limits as well.

It was mid-afternoon on Friday when we started to prepare for the first photo shoot. The Sun was still quite brutal, the temperature was around the forty mark, and we were constantly being warned to drink water whenever possible. Nevertheless, the lack of moisture in the air made the conditions seem quite bearable; it was much more preferable than the horrible mid-thirties mugginess that we were experiencing at our Sydney studios over the last couple of weeks. Much later in the afternoon, just after sunset, the temperature became more comfortable but we then had to deal with the large number of flies which became a particularly bad problem when we had to hold poses for the camera.

Photo shoots are already an exhausting process, repetitive and exacting, but to do it in such harsh conditions was terribly draining. On Saturday we had a dawn photo shoot as well as an afternoon filming and by the end we were all delirious. The dawn photo shoot was particularly frustrating and by the end of it I certainly wasn’t looking forward to the filming, one would think that it would be harder. But, despite the added complexity of filming movement as opposed to capturing still moments, there were so many more people involved one would think that the process would be far harder to co-ordinate, it ended up being so much easier. The greater the logistical problem, the greater it is necessity of organization. What helped were the regular breaks to keep us fresh and hydrated, although I guess in this instance the dancers were not the central focus so we were only given quite general direction. Not only that but we had the extra adrenaline boost from having a helicopter flying over the top of us!

And all the way through, we couldn’t help but take our own photos of the landscape. It was certainly a great way to break in my new digital camera!