About Kirk Bennett

I would like to see a more peaceful world.  Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.

My time is mainly divided between my full-time career as a Cinematographer and my part-time career of Band Director / Performer.  I’m a freelancer and contract worker in the fields of production and post-production for film and broadcast (mainly), and I am a multi-instrumentalist performer with well over 35 years of musical experience.

Having worked in a family business as a teenager I acquired good business skills of all sorts and so I have a good foundation in business matters.  This allowed me to choose careers which extend me and others might not have much of a chance at.

My original formal training in broadcast was in a live-television environment.  Later I moved to smaller, individually produced productions working mainly as a freelance cameraman.  Soon after beginning this I also began working in post-production facilities and then in one (which will remain nameless) in particular where I gained a great deal of experience in various aspects of communications including distribution.  Quality work was the only acceptable option all my working life and so this was no different.

As a teenager I was driven to become a musician, like so many other young people of my generation, quickly developing a taste for the offbeat and pretentious as well as all the mainstream sounds which were exploding onto the airwaves of the day.  Others listened to Beatles and Stones.  I was more into Sonny Boy Williamson or The Nice (predecessor of ELP), Alice Cooper and Alvin Lee.  In the late 1970s I developed a fairly successful (OK, quite successfull if you prefer) career on the Montreal music scene being in demand as a bassist for quite some time.  Today I find myself a well developed Blues performer and avant-garde explorer, but one way or another I’m always driven to perform popular and showband music.  Enter TRACK-9 Showband my musical resurrection (as it were) after a 20 year hiatus from the stage.  My next musical project will be more self-indulgent but nonetheless entrepreneurially driven.

For almost ten years I was stricken with a highly painful disease of the nervous system and was left damaged physically, although minimally at this point, from the experience.  I was determined never to give in to the disease which is usually crippling and permanently disabling once it reaches the level I suffered from.  Two bouts of the disease, one six months after the other, nearly ruined my life for good but the fight was worth it as I have recoverd enough to return to a more or less normal lifestyle.  I never stopped working, although it was impossible to do a day’s work at many stages of suffering, and attribute a great deal of my recovery to my drive to do what I love and believe in.  I am a survivor.  I am humbled by my partner’s dedication to me all the while.

I can be deeply intense, am an ecologist, very passionate about the things in which I am involved, I love animals and children (who both have an uncanny fixation for me somehow) and care very much about the human/living condition.  For me film and music, among other things, are incredible vehicles for learning, communication, and entertainment with vast potential to create positive change in the lives of everyone on the planet.  Who’s life has not been changed by the radio, television or other forms of modern communication not to mention Internet?  Let us not forget the power of the universal language, music!  I am opinionated, involved, often in someone’s face (who else will wake them up?), intellectually engaged, socially aware, and I am in direct communications with people from all walks of life from the heads of boards to homeless people, let’s not forget everyone in between.  I can be faulted for my passion at times which is usually only subdued by reason.

I delight in laughter, live music, theatre, love amusement parks & air-shows, good friends (who are usually somewhat eccentric,) walks in the rain, heavy weather, thunder-storms, warm sheets, incense, and most of all I love my better-half with an intensity only white-hot lava can compare.

Finally I would like thank my my Assitant-in-training, Photographer and Actor Matthias Elsdörfer, for the photograph used in my banner.  Glad to have you along!

Further to this I suggest you visit my personal homepage and explore this blogosphere to find out more about me.  You will discover my film projects, my educational video projects, my efforts to help save the planet, dramatic projects including a docu-drama feature, and many exciting adventures in the entertainment business.  In time all this will be linked together.  Talk about a great project.

 Isn’t life fabulous!