Partnership
WildWooHoo × WELI is the studio's founding partnership, where the research of a behavioural ecologist becomes popular music, film and classroom work. Dr WELI is a behavioural ecologist (PhD, ANU) and a performing artist, and the partnership holds the studio's way of working: begin with the science of how animals live, and carry it into the culture people already love. It is made to travel, 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 it grew into a song, a film and a dance cast that travelled widely. Cabra da Peste came from undergraduate goat research, and it carried that science into Brazilian popular music. Each one 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 animal a single researcher knows best, and stay inside the field that research belongs to: behavioural ecology, the social lives of animals, the way wild creatures behave. There are thousands of species and thousands of field studies, and each one holds a story worth carrying into music.
Living Wild is the name for that wider reach. It keeps the partnership's home ground, the science of animal behaviour, and opens the door to the whole natural world of social animals and the people who study them.
Labs
This is where the studio most wants company. Living Wild welcomes the research labs and field groups already studying animals in the wild, in Australia and around the world, to take part. 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 they leave behind a record of the work and a fresh way for people to meet it. That two-way exchange is the heart of Living Wild, and it is 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 wildlife and the way animals behave, and from the places where animal lives and human ones rhyme. A social group holding together, a courtship, a long migration, a call across a valley: each can become a song, a film or a photograph that a wide audience takes in as feeling first.
This is the work sci pop does best. It draws the parallels between animal behaviour and human society, and it meets the cultural traditions and imaginaries an animal already carries in the human mind. An animal is a creature in the grass and a figure in a story at once, and Living 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 that stands on its own. The same morning with an animal can feed a song, a short film and a photograph, and each form keeps its own life.
Living Wild also goes to heritage places, so the work stays close to human culture as well as to 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
Living 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 animal 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 and live wild together.