Every Australian has seen a cockatoo but never quite like this.
The breathtaking audiovisual installation from Melvin J. Montalban and Leila Jeffries, Temple, opens at the National Film and Sound Archive next week.
Made up of three towering screens, the work features larger-than-life footage of red-tailed cockatoos, galahs and sulphur-crested cockatoos flying through the mist and interacting with water in slow motion.
By slowing the footage down, and enlarging it to fit over three screens, the work highlights details that would otherwise not be seen by the human eye.
"It gives us a chance to see all the details and see how they move," Montalban said.
"When we got the black cockatoos in flight we were able to see them fly through the mist and their waves as sort of their wing flaps create these vortexes and swirls in the mist.
"It was this beautiful process of just following what was happening with the water elements and with the birds exploring that way."
The result is almost a religious experience, the two artists said and is where the work gets the name Temple.
While this work was originally commissioned and displayed for an outdoor display at Vivid Sydney 2022, the indoor installation at the National Film and Sound Archive only enhances this feeling of awe.
This is partly because it is indoors in a room that makes it feel cathedral-like, but also because it is at a larger scale.
"Nature is just so incredible and just fills us with such a sense of awe," Jeffries said.
"So when you slow it down and then you fill a room with mist and have birds flying through it, you get to see, in a new way, just how breathtaking it is and how moving it is.
"I think Canberrans are connected to nature more so than in the bigger cities. And it's exciting to put the work there. Because you already live amongst nature, and you are lucky how much green space you have, how much nature is around, how much wildlife is around."
There was always an element of chance when it came to the creation of Temple. Yes, the two artists had a storyboard heading into the shoot - as well as six months of planning - but at the end of the day, birds don't always take direction.
It helped, however, that the birds they were working with were from Feathered Friends Bird Sanctuary. There, any birds that cannot be released back into the wild, live on a large property where they have the freedom to fly around, without containment.
"They take these birds and they teach them how to almost be like homing pigeons," Jeffries said.
"They can't be released into the wild, for whatever reason, but they can go out and they can fly around this beautiful property and they call them and they come back.
"But we talked with the guys at Feathered Friends about this for six months before we filmed it.
"And everything was set around making sure that these birds are happy and that gave us the ability to try and capture what we can capture."
Temple will be at the National Film and Sound Archive from April 5.
