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The video closes with the woman once again holding the ball as the camera pans out to show her watching the group inside it as they walk away.Įssence, in a brief throwback-to-1995 piece, jokingly commented that the video "has more white-on-white sets than, well, the Essence Festival", but also said that it was "full of more 90s goodness" and concluded with "We love it". Some scenes feature a rippling effect that mimics water. Clips of both the woman and the group walking and running across the dunes are also shown. Shots of a string orchestra and guitarist playing along are interspersed throughout as the group sings the song. The camera zooms in on the ball to reveal an aerial view from a helicopter of Boyz II Men standing atop a sand dune inside it. Filmed at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, it features a woman (played by Tyra Banks) walking through a desert setting and holding a glass ball. The video for "Water Runs Dry" was directed by Wayne Isham. That this catastrophe was is large part man-made is conveyed through footage of the dry riverbed, off-take pipes, massive earth-wall dams and laser-levelled irrigation farms: mute testament to a river system drained of its resilience.In an interview with the Grammys, Nathan Morris said the music video was one of his two favourites out of all the videos the group had ever filmed. The on-going drought in western NSW provided ample opportunity (shifting sands, starving kangaroos) to build a sense of the catastrophe that was engulfing ordinary people and the land. To show some of the things still there we focused on bird life, particularly around the river floodplains and the dwindling Menindee lakes. This was a story of loss, but it was important to show that there was still plenty to save along the Darling/Baarka. Interviews were to be shot using predominantly natural light in locations relevant to the subject matter which was generally along the river. To the voices of indigenous people, we added balance and explanation in the form of interviews with eminent scientists, other community members who were affected, and environmental lawyers. With his background in anthropology, it was the most natural thing for Peter to interview the people of the river – the Barkindji, and to hear their stories of disenfranchisement: anguished wounds that stretched back over generations, but which now bled afresh with the realisation that the Baarka, their Mother, was close to ecological death. It simply could not be right that where the Darling was not dry it was a lurid green, and that millions of fish were dying.
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We did not approach the research and filming of When the River Runs Dry from a partisan position, unless that partisan position was the side of the River. Problems on the Darling had been on the periphery of many people’s awareness for years, but now here was ‘the bill’, the cost of over-extraction of water and institutional indifference manifest in a dying river. Then began a harrowing period, interviewing people, camping by and filming the remains of the Darling, simply capturing the moment. We arrived too late in Menindee – all the fish had sunk to the bottom, leaving only foul green water and a horrible stench. Sensing that this was a pivotal moment in Australia’s environmental history, we, (Peter Yates and Rory McLeod) moved quickly, and were on the road to Menindee within a few hours, to document the event and its impact on the people of the river.
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The devastating sight of enormous Murray Cod, dead in a man’s arms, led first to distress, and then anger. In January 2019, images and videos began to filter through social media of a massive fish-kill on the Darling/Baarka River near Menindee in NSW. When the River Runs Dry was born on an impulse.