Monday, 15 October 2012
6.30pm — 8.30pm
The Dolphin Hotel, Surry Hills
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Guest Speaker: Ben Allan ACS
Ben Allan ACSBen’s earliest memories are of living in a former gold rush town in the Outback and a small island in the middle of the South Pacific.
He wrote, directed, and edited a 60-minute science fiction film when he was 11 years old and by 21 was a Senior Cameraman and Online Editor at a TV station.
As a freelance cinematographer at 27, he became the youngest person ever to be awarded Accreditation by the Australian Cinematographers Society, giving him the right to use the ACS letters after his name.
His cinematography has won numerous awards and, in 2001, he was appointed Editor of the ACS journal Australian Cinematographer.
Ben’s projects as Director of Photography have included the half-hour TV drama Albert’s Chook Tractor, the pilot for the documentary series “The Entrepreneurs”, the digital IMAX documentary Knights of the Sea, episodes for the TV staples “All Saints” and “City Homicide”, and the short films Sexy Thing (Official Selection, Cannes Film Festival 2006) and Desperate Deeds (Hollywood Film Festival 2002).
In 2005 he designed and wrote The Grading Sweet™, an award-winning set of colour grading plugins now used by filmmakers in over 45 countries around the world. Throughout his career as a cinematographer he has continued to produce, edit, colour grade, mix, and occasionally direct.
Since 1999 he has been at the forefront of the digital revolution and developed some of the first film-style gamma curves for digital cameras, something now built into virtually every professional camera. He has also worked directly with most of the major manufacturers on equipment testing including Sony, Panasonic, Canon, ARRI, and Panavision.
Ben has over 1500 TV commercials credits and recently completed post-production on the feature film McLean’s Money, which he shot, edited, and co-produced.