Trailer for Ammunition:
A Happy Ghosts film - Ammunition.
A difficult project to describe or place into a genre it's an hour long sound & video collage of original music by Happy Ghosts; US 1950's advertorial films, guides to 'better' living and government propaganda from the Prelinger Internet Archives; and footage and sound captured in my backyard and studio in South Australia. A huge project more complex than anything I've ever produced.
Here's a bit of a spiel - Ammunition takes the viewer on a wild and dreamy ride from the everyday world to the fantastic and beyond to a place where dreams meet reality and the past meets the future. From sublime moments of floating in space through the beauty and harshness of the natural world to jarring explosions and crashes of the American dream. The film's catch cry is 'Beware of Boredom'.
Happy Ghosts are Andrew Muecke and me, Ashley Starkey - together we produce music and films.
We've recently (Oct 07) finished our first album Secret Code of Beauty, more soon.
Previous releases - For The Sun, Paranormal Behaviour, Something Beautiful & Loosen Up.
Andrew's a musician who's played in numerous bands over many years. Here's his website http://www.andrewmuecke.com. there's a lot more info about Happy Ghosts there.
On a 'normal' day this is how Happy Ghosts work. Andrew makes the music. He records mainly live instrumentation on guitar, bass & keybords and puts it together with pro-tools. I then add some singing/vocals and voice/sound samples. Andrew has a listen and sometimes a track is done at this stage, but generally he'll do some chopping and changing and we go back and forth until we're Happy Ghosts! Sometimes we create together, but we're both busy with family, work, life etc. so it's fantastic to have this creative collaboration that we can work on separately.
When the tracks are ready we'll pick one and make a music clip - Here's Loosen Up, it was a finalist at the 2006 BelowGround Music Video Festival.
Loosen Up
Something Beautiful was one of 60 films selected from around the world for the Portable Film Festival. You can see an excerpt at the link below and the full clip is posted on You Tube.
http://www.starkey.net.au/videos.htm
Booze & Pills was Happy Ghosts first clip and it made the 2005 BelowGround Music Video Finals.
http://www.archive.org/details/BoozePills
Music
Here's a couple of Happy Ghosts tracks in mp3 form.For the Sun was produced for the soundtrack to my solar eclipse documentary The Path of Totality. It was the first track that Andrew and I worked on together.
For the Sun.mp3
Something Beautiful.mp3 is the title track from our second EP.
