Divebar Youth initially approached me with this wacky vision to showcase an antagonistic, alternate world filled with young, nihilistic bloodsucking party-goers. Paired with an incredibly off-the-wall song, the brief had me excited for some lower budget experimentation and risk-taking. We landed on shooting everything with an inverted exposure curve, turning shadows into highlights and vice versa. It felt immediately surreal to look at, and a little different to the thermal imaging that's become rather popular amongst filmmakers today. The trick became designing and lighting each shot for that inverted exposure, meaning that set-ups became far more complex than they have any right to be! But, the challenge was a great one and it blessed us with an interesting new way to generate evocative imagery through contrast rather than art direction. It also afforded myself and the wardrobe designer, Chi, the freedom to create distinct, unique wardrobe looks that married a certain personality to these rather ambiguous feeling characters. The result, as you can definitely see, became something that sits at the intersection between comic-book weirdness, hip-hop edge and EDM rave-hype nihilism. Strange, eclectic, I quite enjoy it.

With a diverse body of work spanning art installations to music videos, Nicholas Muecke understands the nuances of modern production, and knows how to translate the first spark of an idea into diverse, engaging work. He knows the right style for the right job, whether that be his films with education disruptor Creatable or with social media giant Facebook. Having shot commercials for Tourism Australia and a branded documentary on death and dying for the Laurel Palliative Care Foundation, Muecke has worked with non-actors and seasoned performers alike, and made films both humane and surreal. Muecke has a strident belief in the importance of collaboration and curiosity – the safety of the original vision is always there, so why not explore? He has won accolades from Canada Shorts, Adelaide Film Festival, Clipped Festival, the South Australian Screen Awards and ACS Awards. His first short film, Rock, Paper, Scissors, was nominated for Young Australian Filmmaker of the Year at Byron Bay International Film Festival.