Just the other day after purchasing a pork roll (no chirri) from my favourite Vietnamese pork roll emporium on Smith Street, I took a moment to think about the ridiculous year that 2014 had been. In a personal sense, a company sense and just a general world sense.

With that in mind I hope you enjoy our traditional end of year blog which covers the highs and lows of what has been the Chinese Year of the Horse #notadickjoke.

JANUARY

As aways Jan is a bumper month for movies being the lead up to Oscar season so it’s hard to pick a favourite. People seemed to have a love/hate relationship with Inside Llewyn Davis, some people describing it to me as depressing. I was a huge fan on first viewing and an even bigger one on the second. Definitely places in my top 5 films of 2014!

Anyway movies aside we found ourselves having a very busy start to the year at LateNite. Our good pal and frequent collaborator Shelley Farthing-Dawe was over in Indonesia shooting in and around tea plantations whilst myself, Chris and Dan were back home gearing up for our first short of the year to be directed by Dan and his brother Jared. The infamous Daperis Brothers.

Chris also managed to find time to go and road test the newly fitted out Dolby Atmos studio at Soundfirm which you can read about here.

And Jacqui?

Well, she spent most of the month just kinda hanging around.

FEBRUARY

February at the cinema served up a similar quality to January with films like Blue is the Warmest Colour, Dallas Buyers Club, The Past and Labour Day (minus the sexy pie making scene) being released. My pick though was another film directed by a favourite of mine, Nebraska. I’d seen it in Cannes the year before and the beautiful simplicity of it really got to me. Helped that it had a string of knockout performances by June Squibb, Will Forte and of course Bruce Dern.

Feb brought to us our first big shoot of the year and also our newest team member. Sumah Hurley came in for a coffee on a whim after moving down from Brisbane and before she knew it had been trapped into producing the Daperis short by the famous Chris Hocking Stone Wall. She has since become a permanent and very important member of the team.

So with HIT (the short in question) firmly in her capable hands, Chris and myself took off to Adelaide with our good friend Sam Rankin and his brother Nick to shoot part of a documentary (still in post) called Come Heckle Christ. We’ll reveal more in the New Year but we basically spent a week filming a lot of angry Christians protesting against a show in the Adelaide Fringe.

Feb was also a month of friends doing some pretty bloody wonderful things. Jaime Snyder’s film Violent Florence (which had Chris on as Technical Director) was fortunate enough to be accepted into the prestigious SXSW Film Festival and after 364 days on the road, the Love Your Sister team led by Samuel Johnson and our good mate Al Marks returned from their epic fundraising adventure around Australia.

We were there at Fed Square to welcome the team back home after raising a whopping $1,447,630 for Breast Cancer Research. The journey hasn’t stopped though, with Sam and his sister Connie releasing a book and continuing to promote being breast aware.

You can donate or find out more about the cause here.

The month was ended with this little gem from Michael Shanks featuring me in a wet suit that Hocking wore when he was 15.

Fit like a glove.

MARCH

If you went to the cinemas in March, choosing a movie was like choosing your favourite member of One Direction at gun point. The list of terrible films that were released was as long as Michael Fassbender’s penis with films like I, Frankenstein, Pompeii, The Monuments Men, an unnecessary 300 sequel and Cuban Fury.

Luckily for us Aronofsky decided he couldn’t be fucked with the Oscars so he released Noah which was a thoroughly enjoyable take on the classic biblical tale.

The start of March saw myself, Nathan Wentworth and the lovely Tegan Higginbotham head on over to New Orleans to see our 48 Hour Award winning short, Flash screen during Filmapalooza.

Although there were a few near death experiences to be had (if you’re ever in New Orleans stay the hell away from Seventh Ward, no matter how much you want the Gumbo), the film screened really well and it was eventually selected in the Top 10 to screen over at the Cannes Short Film Corner later in the year.

The rest of March included another Windsor Smith TVC, some casting for the Daperis Brothers Short HIT and Shanks doing some VFX testing for a possible new music video.

APRIL

I’ve yet to include a trailer with whimsy. So although the month of April saw the release of some great films like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Lego Movie and Only Lovers Left Alive, I opted for whimsy in glorious 4:3.

April is where things started to heat up for us with the Daperis Brothers directing their second short film, HIT. It was all hands on deck over the 3 shoot days and the good news is that post production has only just recently been completed so the film is on it’s way to festivals as we speak. Thanks again to all the wonderful people who crewed on this little gem of a short – can’t wait to share it with you all.

When HIT was all done and dusted the LateNite Family took some much needed personal time with Hocking boarding a plane for an overseas trip, Sumah taking up a new job on It’s a Date and me signing on to do a play at La Mama Theatre.

Oh, and we also got word that our short Rocketman would be screening at St Kilda Film Festival in May.

Not a bad way to end the month.

MAY

May brought us a weird mish mash of blockbusters and low budget indies. A particular favourite of mine was Chef, directed by John Favreau. It was a big change for the director after spending the last few years in blockbuster land and a welcome one at that.

So with Hocking on a boat somewhere sipping cocktails and slyly checking his emails under a banana lounge, the rest of the team were prepping for what was going to be one of the busier 6 month periods that we’ve experienced.

Dan and myself were into the early stages of post on both HIT and Come Heckle Christ as Shanks jumped on a plane over to Cannes to discuss a music video that we were to shoot the following month. Thanks to our good friends at Inspiration I was also in the early stages of putting together a short called Palindromes which was designed to test the limits of the new RED Dragon Camera.

And then came June…