CANBERRA film makers Silver Dory Productions have announced the general public release of their film “Brindabellas: edge of light”, including the premiere of the “Brindabellas Shorts” series on ABC iView.

The entire 140 minutes of “Brindabellas: edge of light” will be freely available as 22 chapters on the film’s website (brindabellas.com.au), Vimeo and YouTube. The ABC is also featuring eight of these chapters in their “Brindabellas Shorts” series on the Arts Channel of iView.

Since its initial cinema preview at the National Film and Sound Archive’s Arc Cinema in 2014 the unique infrared feature-length film has only been available as a limited download to purchase. Now with the first general public release of the entire film, it has also been upgraded to 4K resolution.

For Silver Dory’s Glen Ryan and James van der Moezel this is the final step in a journey that started in 2013 when they decided to write and produce a feature-length film entirely with light from the near-infrared spectrum – slightly beyond what the human eye can see.

For van der Moezel, who is -head of post-production at Silver Dory – one of the main challenges of this project was finding a way to deliver such an unconventional film to a wide range of viewers.

“We…realised that two hours of black and white landscape art might not be for everyone – or easy to market and deliver to a wider audience. So we worked on developing a modular concept which could be broken down into smaller sections for different audiences on different platforms,” he says.

Ryan says the project has been featured, purchased and licensed around the world and footage has been shown at major international trade shows like NAB in Las Vegas and featured by film industry giants RED Digital Cinema. It’s also been used to promote a range of commercial products internationally – from South Korean cars to Irish broadband networks.

But the hope has always been to show as much of the project to as many people as possible rather than break it up into small fragments to license.

“Brindabellas: edge of light” is described by the pair as “an immersive cinematic journey through the sky and landscapes of the Canberra region of Australia – in particular the Brindabella Ranges. The film focuses on the interplay of mountain light, air and water as these elements are transformed across the seasons – from clouds to mist, rain and snow – then frost and ice – and onto creeks and rivers.”

But as Ryan says, it explores at length an everyday back-drop to a capital city.

“While a lot of the film looks like fairly remote mountain wilderness most of the landscapes featured were actually filmed from within Canberra’s southern suburbs, often simply from the side of major roads. The most remote location featured (Corin Dam) is still less than an hour’s drive from the centre of Canberra.”

The ambiguity of exactly where the edge of the city transforms into the edge of the wilderness is what made Canberra the perfect setting for this project, he explains, but many people find it hard to believe that the film was essentially shot within the capital city of Australia.

“Brindabellas Shorts” (eight chapters) is available on ABC iView (until August 15) at: http://iview.abc.net.au/collection/brindabellas and “Brindabellas: edge of light” is now available to view (all 22 chapters) at: http://brindabellas.com.au/edge-of-light