Partnership
WildWooHoo × WELI is the studio's founding partnership, where an evolutionary ecologist's research becomes popular music, film and classroom work. Dr WELI is an evolutionary ecologist (PhD, ANU) and a performing artist, and the partnership holds the studio's way of working: begin with the science of how living things live, and carry it into the culture people already love. It travels from the field to the song.
Songs
The first songs show how it works. Kangaroo Time came from doctoral fieldwork on the personality and social behaviour of wild eastern grey kangaroos, and grew into a song, a film and a dance cast that travelled widely. Cabra da Peste came from undergraduate goat research, and carried that science into Brazilian popular music. Each began as a question about an animal and arrived as a song people could feel.
Wider
Once the partnership was working, a wider scope opened. The studio wants to go past the one species a single researcher knows best, and stay inside the field that research belongs to: evolutionary ecology, the lives of animals, plants and fungi, the way wild things behave and grow. Thousands of species and thousands of field studies each hold a story worth carrying into music.
Going Wild is the name for that wider reach. It keeps the partnership's home ground, field ecology, and opens to the whole living world and the people who study it.
Labs
This is where the studio most wants company. Going Wild welcomes research labs and field groups already studying wild species, in Australia and around the world, to take part. Animal behaviour, plant ecology, anything alive and studied in the field. The science stays yours, and the studio brings the music, the film and the sci pop craft, so the work you already do reaches a wide public as feeling and image first.
A few days of creative company sit lightly alongside a research trip, and leave behind a record of the work and a fresh way for people to meet it. That two-way exchange is the heart of Going Wild, and the part the partnership most wants to grow.
Together
With a lab's fieldwork and knowledge, the studio can make more stories in popular music drawn from the living world, the way wild things behave and grow, and the places where their lives and human ones rhyme. A social group holding together, a courtship, a long migration, a call across a valley, a forest keeping time: each can become a song, a film or a photograph a wide audience takes in as feeling first.
This is the work sci pop does best. It draws the parallels between the living world and human society, and meets the cultural traditions and imaginaries a species already carries in the human mind. A species is a life in the field and a figure in a story at once, and Going Wild works both together.
Field
In the field, each visit gathers nature photography, wildlife film, writing and field sound recording. That material becomes narratives and audiovisuals, source material for the music and for EVER+GROW, the album the studio is building, and standalone wildlife storytelling. The same morning with an animal can feed a song, a short film and a photograph, and each form keeps its own life.
Going Wild also goes to heritage places, so the work stays close to human culture as well as the natural world. A place that holds human meaning and a place that holds wild animals are often the same place, and the strand honours both at once.
Join
Going Wild is a concept in active development, and the studio is opening it now, in the open. If you run a research lab, a field-science group or a university programme with fieldwork ahead, and you would welcome the studio's company and craft, the partnership would love to build it with you. Institutions working in media and wildlife documentary film are welcome too.
The studio also welcomes a wildlife cinematographer or director of photography, and a field-sound recordist, to spend time in the field and co-create. Write to hello@wildwoohoo.com, and let us go wild together.