A Selection of Guest Contributors to the Postgraduate Diploma in Natural History Filmmaking and Communication

Robert Brown - Cameraman

After buying his first movie camera at the age of 10, he started filming. By the age of 16 he had won numerous awards both in New Zealand and internationally. In the seventies Robert joined Television New Zealand and helped start the precursor to nhnz. He trained at the BBC and was subsequently invited to work for the BBC Natural History Unit, where he was considered one of the world’s finest cameramen specialising in animal behaviour. He worked extensively for the BBC, in particular on Sir David Attenborough's The Trials of life, The Living Planet and The Life of Birds. He won a Feltex Television Award for craft excellence. Robert shows how to get down and dirty with the animals in NHFC 401, the techniques paper. He is also acts as a consultant to the students when making their films as part of NHFC 405.
http://www.wildfilm.co.nz/robert.htm

Paddy Richardson – Author

Paddy’s work has appeared in journals, anthologies, and on radio. A collection of short stories, Choices, was published in 1986 and her first novel The Company of a Daughter in 2000. She was the 1997 Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. Paddy teaches creative writing at Otago Polytechnic and English at the University of Otago. Paddy takes a section on short-story writing for NHFC 402, the storytelling paper.

Mike Rubbo – Filmmaker and Painter

Mike has made many award-winning documentaries, including Sad Song of Yellow Skin (winner of the British Flaherty Award); Waiting for Fidel (in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NY); Little Box that Sings (comparing Australian violin makers with those in Cremona, Italy); and Much Ado about Something (investigating whether Christopher Marlowe could have been the unsung genius behind William Shakespeare). Each year, Mike has flown out from his current base in Australia to enthrall the students of NHFC 402.
http://www.cust.idl.net.au/rubbo/RubboThree.htm

Grahame Sydney - Painter

New Zealand’s most famous and proficient landscape painter, Grahame has been a full-time painter since the mid-seventies. An unapologetic regionalist, Grahame is noted for his realism. Grahame's passion for painting has never diminished. Working in oils, watercolours, tempera, etchings and lithographs, he produces works of beguiling simplicity, where composition is everything and reality, as opposed to realism, a figment of the imagination. His book, The Art of Grahame Sydney, won the Montana Medal for Non-fiction and the Readers’ Choice Award at the 2000 Montana Book Awards. Grahame inspires the NHFC 402 class with stories about composition, about aiming high and about leaving a mark.
http://www.grahamesydney.com

Neville Peat – Natural History Author and Photographer

Neville is one of New Zealand’s leading nature writers. He is the author of more than 30 books, many of which are on natural history themes - including the award-winning Wild Dunedin (NZ Montana Book Awards 1996). Two books, The Falcon and the Lark and Coasting - The Sea Lion and the Lark are notable pieces of natural history writing in that they are narrative accounts of a character called the Lark who develops a special relationship with falcons and sea lions. Neville contributes to NHFC 403, the critique paper.

Burton Silver – Author, Cartoonist, Inventor, Eccentric

Burton defies description. A man whose career path looks like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, he manages to stride from one unlikely success to another. He found fame as a cartoonist with a natural history flavour, whose improbable main characters, a woodsman and hedgehog, have a fondness for cannabis. He’s produced many books that have been surprising best sellers: from crossword books on waterproof paper – so they can be done in the bath – to a book of instructions on how to do origami in the shape of male genitalia. But without doubt, his most wildly successful publishing ventures have been the somewhat tongue-in-cheek Why Cats Paint, followed by the book that really did start a craze, Dancing with Cats. He is currently sinking all his cash into a new game he has invented that is played with an oval-shaped golf ball. Burton is a walking demonstration to NHFC 403 of the value of thinking laterally; an encouragement to think outside the square.
http://www.monpa.com