Young Gisborne filmmaker and artist Lucas Taylor is being celebrated with the best in the state.
In an extraordinary achievement, the Alice Miller School student has works featured in three Melbourne exhibitions: Top Screen 2024, Top Designs 2024 and Top Arts 2024.
These exhibitions display outstanding film, art and design works from VCE and VCE VET students across the state.
Launching last week, Top Arts showcases Lucas’ digital video work, Routine, which explores the deadening effects of relentless routine, depicting the repetitious tasks of corporate life while advocating for the preservation of the self.
His work was heavily influenced by early surrealist photographers, Man Ray and Philippe Halsman.
Halsman’s work, The Versatile Jean Cocteau, depicts the star with several arms performing many tasks and was a big inspiration.
“I have adapted this idea to create a piece that captures a modern corporate life,” Lucas said.
“The subject is staring into the lens performing different tasks in several costumes to show different elements of their mind. “They are trying to escape this mundane repetitious lifestyle and are ambitious but just not ever getting there.”
With his father Peter acting as his subject, Lucas used a greenscreen to capture a series of scenes in an 11-hour shoot.
He was using visual effects for the first time.
He also experimented with sound and pacing, influenced by English filmmaker Edgar Howard Wright.
“Sound was just as important as the visual. I wanted it to be confronting,” he said.
Lucas captured sound separately to be overlaid in production, which ranged from typing to chasing chickens.
His work was among 45 selected for Top Arts from a competitive pool of nearly 1200 applicants across Victoria.
Top Screen 2024 and Top Designs 2024 feature his short film, Don’t Burn the Toast, described as an absurdist comedy following a teen making breakfast and confronting the absurd fantasies of the kitchen.
Lucas completed both VCE projects last year and has now entered his final high school year.
He has begun exploring other creative film projects in his spare time and hopes to further his study in this field sometime in the future.
Top Arts 2024 is on display from now until to July 14 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square. Entry is free.
Top Screen 2024 launched at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, last week.
The ticketed event will be showing until May 8, with an opportunity for people to interact with the young filmmakers.
Top Designs 2024 will run from March 23 until July 14 at the Melbourne Museum, 11 Nicholson Street, Carlton.
