So James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge is on SBS TV this Sunday night at 8:30pm. Certainly worth a look. Music by yours truly, Ricky Edwards and Amy Bastow. Good times.

Here’s a link to the SBS promo.

Mako Mermaids, a 26-part childrens TV series I co-composed with Ricky Edwards premieres this Friday 13th Feb (auspicious!) on NETFLIX and locally as Mako: Island of Secrets on ELEVEN this Sunday 15th Feb at 10am. Get your kids to watch it. It’s a great series: high production values and, of course, a great score!

“In this hit sequel to “H20: Just Add Water,” new merman Zac becomes a target of the mermaid council when they see his strong and mysterious connection to Mako Island as a threat to mermaids everywhere. To stop Zac, they send two new young mermaids ashore to strip him of his merman powers, not knowing that there might be another merman in town that poses an even greater risk to the pod.”

It was a huge honour being nominated along with Amy Bastow and Ricky Edwards for Best Music for a Documentary at this years AACTA awards for Deepsea Challenge 3D. Congratulations to Jed Kurzel who got the gong for ‘All This Mayhem’ (which I must track down, especially given how many other awards it picked up). It was a good show. Pic left to right: Brett (I love the red carpet) Aplin, Amy Bastow & Ricky Edwards.

OK, I’m feeling pretty damn proud right about now to have picked up a nomination at this years AACTA (AFI) Awards for our score to Deepsea Challenge 3D. We are in the Best Original Music Score in a Documentary category. Stiff competition but that somehow makes the acknowledgement even more humbling. Congrats to my co-nominees Ricky and Amy (and a HUGE thanks to Peter H)

That brings the total nominations for Deepsea Challenge to a whopping 4!

From the AACTA website:

“The AACTA Award for Best Documentary Television Program presented by Foxtel Movies sees the Oscar-winning Eva Orner nominated for her SBS television documentary THE NETWORK, alongside TENDER (ABC) and the series BRILLIANT CREATURES: GERMAINE, CLIVE, BARRY & BOB (ABC) and TAKING ON THE CHOCOLATE FROG (Foxtel – STUDIO).

A number of the previously announced nominees for Best Feature Length Documentary received craft award nominations today, with UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL up for six AACTA Awards, and ALL THIS MAYHEM and DEEPSEA CHALLENGE 3D receiving four nominations each.

Australian music icons Nick Cave and Warren Ellis are among the nominees for the new AACTA Award for Best Original Music Score in a Documentary presented by APRA AMCOS for TENDER (ABC). Jed Kurzel (ALL THIS MAYHEM), Jed Palmer and Zoë Barry (UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL) and Ricky Edwards, Brett Aplin and Amy Bastow (DEEPSEA CHALLENGE 3D) round out the nominees in this category.

The Australian Academy congratulates all nominees for the 4th AACTA Awards.”

If you missed it in cinemas, James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge 3D has just been released on Blu-ray. You should check it out. Music score of course by Brett Aplin, Ricky Edwards and Amy Bastow. You can get it pretty much anywhere but here is one link. Here’s another!

Great news! Along with co-composer Ricky Edwards, Brett Aplin has just been nominated for this years APRA-AGSC Australian Screen Music Awards in the category ‘Best Music for Children’s Television’ for ‘Mako Mermaids‘. You can listen to some of his music for season 1 here.

Do check out the other nominees at this link as well as all the other categories filled with amazing screen composers!

Staged jointly by APRA AMCOS and the AGSC (Australian Guild of Screen Composers), the Screen Music Awards celebrate those quiet achievers of the Australian music industry who create the magic between screen and sound. This year’s event will be held on Wednesday 12 November at the City Recital Hall in Sydney, and will feature nominated compositions performed by an orchestra as directed by Emmy Award winning screen composer Ashley Irwin.

I went to the Deepsea Challenge 3D Melbourne preview last night with co-composer Amy Bastow at the Jam Factory in South Yarra. John Garvin who is the Co-Writer, Life Support Supervisor and Dive Instructor featured in the film gave a great speech beforehand honouring Jim and all those who had contributed to the journey giving the screening last night extra resonance. Quite an account of the story behind the film and a moving tribute to inspirational co-director Andrew Wight and underwater cameraman Mike deGruy who died during filming. Andrew’s family was in attendance. I hope they were proud of all our efforts.

Deepsea Challenge 3D opens Australia wide this Thursday 21 August.

The Trigger Point documentary mini-series is now available to purchase on DVD courtesy of ABC Shops. It’s *very* good. Buy it now!

Aussie poster is out. You know if you squint just so, you might see a familiar name in the credits…

Our documentary series Trigger Point begins tonight at 9:30pm on ABC1, and was flagged by Fairfax newspapers as their ‘Pick of the Week’. Take a look – review below.

“TRIGGER POINT
New series
★★★★
Sunday 1 June, 9.30pm, ABC1
Veteran Fairfax crime reporter John Silvester fronts this excellent two-part documentary examining the issue of police shootings in Victoria. When these stories hit the headlines the focus is – understandably – very much on the victims and their families. What we tend not to see, either in the news or in fiction, is an account of how these incidents affect the men and women pulling the trigger. That’s what this doco sets out to address, along with an intelligent backgrounder on how and why firearms became part of the everyday uniform of Australian police. Silvester’s access is impressive. We don’t just get interviews with a dozen key players (members of the notorious armed robbery squad, the officers associated with the Walsh Street shootings, family members, all the way up to Victorian police chief Ken Lay). There’s also a quantity of disturbing, moving and enlightening archival police footage of crime scenes and investigations. (And a warning: some of it is horribly explicit.) It’s a visceral reminder of the reality of these incidents. Most compelling, though, are simply the accounts from the officers involved who talk frankly about how terrified they are when confronted with an armed villain, how that fear affects your judgment, and the awful and enduring emotional fallout when you realise you’ve taken someone’s life. Popular culture encourages us to believe that police officers are somehow superhuman, a special breed. One of the most powerful aspects of this story is the reminder that, like us, they are simply frail human beings. This episode deals with a number of stories we’re all familiar with, either from the newspapers or the Underbelly sagas. And as Silvester points out, while there’s always concern about police shooting and killing people, the general public isn’t all that fussed when the victims are hardened criminals. Next week we look in detail at the shooting of Melbourne teenager Tyler Cassidy in a suburban skate park: something that didn’t just horrify the public, but devastated the officers involved”.

– Melinda Houston – Fairfax June 1 2014