Saturday, June 13, 2020

Dinosaur footprints of Broome, Western Australia

The worlds largest dinosaur footprints along with thousands of others can be found near Broome in Western Australia. They are located on spectacular coastline which many tourists come a long way to see. The tourists are often completely oblivious to the fact that beneath their feet are 130 million year old impressions of dinosaur feet embedded in the sandstone.

Since working in the Kimberly area I have been a little obsessed with the footprints and spent quite a lot of time doing my own exploring of the area. The coastline up here is vast and strong tides can change the landscape quickly so there is every chance you can go out and discover prints that have not been seen by any human, ever. Best to get a photo because the next tide will do its best to turn that print back to sand. 

This would make a great Biodiversity Shorts episode. So I went out, filmed a lot, used a drone to document what I found and generally just enjoyed exploring and imagining dinosaurs all over the place. I did this between tours over a couple of years. Then, on the plane flying out of Broome I watched an awesome little segment in a documentary called '"Outback" The Kimberley Comes Alive' on the very same footprints. I discovered a fellow named Steve Salisbury had been studying the footprints for years and had even documented them all using drones. At the time I was a little disappointed that someone had beat me to it but I later found that in order to watch that documentary again I would have to book another Broome-Perth flight with Qantas.

With my seasonal work cancelled this year and some necessary self isolation I had the chance to seriously nerd out. I learnt all I could on the subject, experimented with some cool special effects and polished the footage into what I think is a half decent documentary. 

So this is my contribution to raising awareness, promoting and telling the world about the dinosaur footprints of Broome, Western Australia. 

Big screen, big speakers. Enjoy.


More of my mini documentaries.

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

What is Steady Wombat?

Its a brand name to represent a brand that can be attached to anything, memorable enough to that you do not forget it and unique enough that no one else had the domain name already. Plus wombats are cute, Australian and useful for all sorts of tasks such as carrying camera gimbals and digging up carrots.

My other brands are RCHacker (Radio Controlled Hacker) and BiodiversityShorts (Short nature videos). Never successful enough to ever do full time and both niche topics, something I regard as hobbies today. I started making some videos on advanced photography techniques which I put under my own name on youtube. Marc Griffith. That has worked pretty well, at least when I incognito google search my own name I that channel comes out on top. A small problem there is another Marc Griffith, and he is on IMDB, and he recently co-directed a movie called 'Great Bear Rainforest'. I wonder if he has seen Biodiversity Shorts? Drop me a line Marc, I'll come and work with you after this covid business is all over.

On Covid19. The last few years I have worked as a tour director on the Canning Stock Route. Its about as good as it gets for that type of work in Australia. Challenging, rewarding and the pay is not too bad. Trouble is the 2020 Season has been cancelled, so no job for me. Tourism is great because you can create wonderful experiences for people out of nothing. Only trouble is when shit goes down its the first type of work that disappears. Tourism really is non-essential.

Hence Steady Wombat. I'm using this time to re-train myself as a software engineer. Something I used to do before I became an overland tour driver.
Artificial Intelligence, machine learning I find it super interesting and it is rapidly becoming part of everyones lives whether we like it or not. The aim is to bring all my knowledge and experience tie it all together with some machine learning and make a business with it, or at least have fun learning and get a job out of it later.
So I created 'Steady Wombat' and have started studying tensorflow. Hopefully Steady Wombat will be an essential AI business in the future supplying fruit picking robots, but for now just me sitting on a domain name with a one post blog.

Meanwhile if you need someone to film something special or produce a little video I'm available. :)

Watch this space.