Steve and I have been working on Supplements 4 to 6 of the archive. They will all be devoted to the rainforest at night. Like Supplements 1 to 3 they will each be about an hour long. This means we have had to  suspend work on videos for EOL. Our night filming season ended on shoot 53 on May 10. Miraculously, given that I am unable to film in the rain, the continual wet weather hardly interrupted our weekly schedule. I have nearly 10 ½ hours of night footage and have finished part of the initial shot selection. Days of watching footage, logging shots and putting them into my lap top converted to Steve assembling them on his hard drive in 2 hours this evening.

I was unsuccessful in my grant application. Apparently applications for funding contributions to collections seem to require a Statement of Significance, but this was not made clear to us. I must say I was rather annoyed because we included a letter of support from the State Library of Queensland confirming their desire to include the videos in their heritage collections. The RADF letter appeared to indicate that provided the Statement of Significance passed muster we would be awarded a grant. The deadline for the next round is in September.

Steve and I completed another 4 videos from the list of old Standard Definition footage for EOL via vimeo, bringing the total to 54, of which 27 have been uploaded since EOL started harvesting from vimeo. We also made all the older videos devoted to a single species, EOL harvestable.

The grant application was submitted today. We will be informed about the outcome in May.

I have received the information required to apply for a Regional Art Development Fund grant. The grant is for creating data files and DVDs of the 100 plus hours of the video archive for the State Library of Queensland. Steve got the library’s understanding that we include a high resolution version for future  editing purposes.

Today I received the great news that EOL is now able to harvest videos from vimeo. Compared with generating new website gallery pages and converting the data they contain to XML, making the videos harvestable only involves providing the binomial (scientific name) and family to which a species belongs, adding some specific tags and including the relevant licensing agreement.

I received an email from Lynne Sealie, the communications manager of ALA, which is an international partner of EOL, praising our website and flagging various linkages, including displaying my images on their site.

I felt somewhat daunted by the thought that I have such a backlog of images to get onto EOL.

I received an email from a friend, which caused me to Google the scientific name of the Leaf-Tailed Gecko. Inter alia I clicked on a Wikipedia entry provided by the State Library of Queensland and at the bottom of the page they included a ‘See the Leaf-tailed Gecko on the Encyclopedia of Life’ link, which I followed and was taken straight to my page! That was a real boost.

I phoned Simon to tell him about this and he replied with some terrific news of his own. He had proposed to Nicole early on New Year’s Day and been accepted. Talk about a great start to 2011.

Having read Chris Palmer’s timely and groundbreaking book ‘Shooting in the Wild’, about the trials and tribulations of wild-life filmmaking, with his welcome emphasis on the appropriate ethical requirements of the genre, I emailed him my appreciation of what he had done. I recommend his book to all who feel that deception, misrepresentation, and exploitation of animals has no place in natural history documentaries.

Received the last of eight daily emails from Peter Hendry, an expert with whom Doug White put me in contact, following a presentation of my DVD Looking Out For The Overlooked at the June Landcare meeting. In one of his emails he referred to difficulty with images. I thought he was referring to mine, but it turned out he was referring to some of the reference images used to identify my moths. I wonder if the Queensland Museum knows of him. I had some moths identified via the museum. This took quite a while. I sent Peter my email, with six moths for him to identify, in the morning and received a reply that afternoon.