Huge night at BMM

BMM 20 November 2025

WOW, WOW, WOW....Our club meeting on Thursday 20^th November was a ‘sell out’.

David opened the meeting at 7.30, welcoming 40-plus members and guests, although not quite as big (or as well dressed) as the audience for the club's films shown in City Hall in 1951.

Among the members David LW, Nigel, Paul, Adam, Peter W, Murray, Noel, Michael M, Bala, Heather, Damian, Jenn, Leonie, David F, Jason, Grace, Bernice, Joel. Among the guests Robbie Lusher, Michael Richards, Kathryn Porter, James Wilson, Ry Waters, Ayata Saio, Yohiyusu Yunezuka, Nicky Murray, John Harrison, Rue Miller. We had apologies from Glenn, Neal and Val. We missed you heaps.

Unfortunately Pope Leo XIV was not able to make it on the night but, as David reminded us, during the week he honoured filmakers as “pilgrims of the imagination”. Good to have friends in high places. Appropriate, as it was also the second anniversary of the Club’s landmark Eleven Tomorrow’s portmanteau of future films.

David and Glenn took cameras to the Meanjin Reggae Festival at Musgrave Park – David showed hyperlapse sequence shot by Glenn but David stayed the whole day. If you would like to see the Kohsuke’s edit of David’s footage click here .

The first of our special guests was Rue Miller, from Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF)  27-30 November. This is Queensland’s premier film festival which this year is featuring 62 films with internationally acclaimed directors. Rue generously offered the club some complementary double passes. It’s a great supportive collaboration of like-minded film enthusiasts.

Projection Domes. Our second special guest was Robbie Lusher founder and owner of The Dome Company . As we found out, Robbie “loves” geodesic Domes. He built his first one in 1973 and has been building them ever since, at last count more than 500. Robbie showed a wide selection of geodesic domes which have been used for promotional purposes, movie sets, exhibitions, parties and festivals around the world. Among the project domes he highlighted were for Bluey’s World, Brisbane Writers Festival, Mercedes Benz Roadshow, Commonwealth Games, Nike, Rocket launch in Arnhem Land, Avalon airshow, 100 years of Woolworths, and Byron Bay Film festival, Charleville Cosmos Centre Planetarium and a Yoga Dome in Uki (NSW). Robbie said he was working towards a massive dome for the Brisbane Olympics and invited BMM to be involved by providing footage. His invitation: “Make some content”.

Green Room Films. Nine months ago, Peter W started his ‘passion project’ of an extention to his house with a “green room’ which budding and/or experienced film makers use to workshop and make films. The Green Room was finished in May and so far 12 films have been made in the studio. Peter showed two of the latest productions - “Coming Out”, a very relevant and emotional movie. By contrast, the latest film made is a clever, hilarious film called “Say Bidet, Mate”. Toilet humour at its best/worst. All of it is a tribute to the 26 film makers who took advantage of Peter’s extremely generous offer to participate in the workshops and gain experience in camera, audio, lighting as well as producing, editing and acting.

Tech talk After the break and much socialising, our third special guest Kohsuke gave a presentation on AI generation programs – specifically, Sora which is described as a ‘video generator’ which enables users to create videos from text prompts, images. As Kohsuke said, the more detailed prompt, the more detailed the video. Here’s the prompt that Kohsuke gave the program to create a video on the spot. I want it to be photo realisrtic, use 4K, cinematic lighting, 120fps slow motion, shot on an 85mm lens, shallow depth of field, smooth camera track that follows the plot of motion. This was produced in just a couple of minutes.

In addition to the Sora’s text-to-video, Kohsuke talked about another AI program called Suno which “uses artifcial intelligence to create original songs including vocals, lyrics and instrumentation from a text prompt". Kohsuke also showed a video which featured an original solo guitar track created by David which Suno converted into a full orchestral piece. The prompt... nostalgic melody, warm strings, soft woodwind, harp, celestial sparkle light build to gentle cinematic climax, no modern drums or synths, dreamy.

The power of AI has to be seen and heard to be believed. The program is free for limited use but for longer and more complex videos you have to pay.

To round out the meeting, David showed two videos – Naqoyqatsi – Life as War part of a trilogy by Francis Ford Coppola. There was no dialogue or text, just images showing mankind and humans as ‘war-mongering' and Thanksgiving Prayer an ironic poem by William S Burrows directed by Gus va Sant which “expresses gratitude for negative aspects of American society, including the exploitation of natural resources, racial violence, the hypocrisy of religious institutions, and the erosion of privacy”.

The meeting wrapped up at 9.30. Members and guests certainly got their monies worth tonight.

Our next meeting is on the Thursday 3^rd of December which will be out end-of-year/Christmas breakup. Hopefully we will have another big roll-up.