Melissa with eel during filming of “Longfin” (Photo courtesy of M Salpietra).

Melissa Salpietra (Class of 2005/06) ran into old high school chum (Jennifer Jacquet) when attending the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival this year, where her film (made with Lindsey Davidson) was a finalist in the Marion Zunz Best Newcomer Award. Melissa and Jennifer hail from the tiny town of Granville, Ohio, with a single high school and a graduating class of just 112. Read More...

To allow extra time over the Christmas/New Year break to get applications sent in for the Master of Science Communication (MSciComm), the application deadline has been extended until 21 January 2008.


Successful candidates will be notified by the end of January.


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Judith Helfand (left) and Sarita Seigel in Madison

Lloyd has just returned from the Tales from Planet Earth film festival held in Madison, Wisconsin, where he presented a retrospective on penguins in films.


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Lindsey filming the eels.


“Longfin,” the film by Lindsey Davidson and Melissa Salpietra (Class of 2005/06) was selected as one of three finalists in the Marion Zunz Best Newcomer Award at the 2007 Jackson Hole International Wildlife Film Festival. This is the biggest festival on the calendar in North America and it is the second time one of our student films has been a finalist for the newcomer award (“Under their Skin” by Will Clark and Melissa Pentecost was a finalist in 2005 – the festival being held every two years).

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The cover of “Looking for Darwin”


On Sunday 7 October, Lloyd’s latest book – called Looking for Darwin – was launched at the Auckland Museum in association with the Darwin exhibition (on loan from the American Museum of Natural History in New York). The book was launched by Ruud “the Bugman” Kleinpaste, star of the internationally acclaimed television series, Buggin’ with Ruud.




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Mark and Pip in the field interviewing one of their “expert witnesses”


“Prints of Darkness” by Mark Orton and Pip Walls (Class of 2006/07) as well as “Calici: a rural conspiracy” by Claudia Babirat (MSciComm) have both been selected as Finalists in DOCNZ 2007 – the international documentary film festival that tours New Zealand.




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Jinty with survival food.

Jinty MacTavish from the Class of 2006/07 leaves tomorrow for the UK and Greenland with a group of three filmmaking students from Otago Girls’ High School. The trip is the major prize from the Royal Society of New Zealand’s (RSNZ) “Big Science Adventure” Competition, which they run in association with our filmmaking programme and which is funded largely by sponsorship from the Freemasons.

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Seeing the light: a labrador’s take on the world.





Every new centre should have its mascot and Inca is hereby declared the mascot of the new Centre for Science Communication. She’s a young black labrador with a soft heart and sharp teeth. Kinda like us really?!


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Cover of DVD




A DVD on the people and wildlife of the Otago Peninsula (A Visual Journey of the Otago Peninsula) was launched by the Otago Peninsula Community Board at a function held last night in the Portobello Hall. Read More...