Sonic Nomad seeks to expose alternative truths and voices through Film, TV and music Production…

Sonic Nomad aka Grant Leigh Saunders is a Freelance Writer/Director/Producer and Performer who can also shoot, edit, sound design and mix. After some years of study and travel and moving from job contract to job contract Saunders momentarily settled his nomadic lifestyle and camped at Australia’s National Public Broadcaster, ABC TV. From 2007-2011 Saunders produced over 20 TV half hour documentaries, as well as a slue of music videos and mini doco interstitials for the Indigenous program, Message Stick. In July 2012  Message Stick was decommissioned and Saunders’s position was made redundant but Sonic Nomad got itchy feet way before that and left for greener pastures in Merewether, Newcastle, 2 hours north of Sydney, and since has reinvented himself as a freelance Producer and teacher of Digital Media within the Fine Arts Faculty of Hunter TAFE, Newcastle.

Sonic Nomad graduated from the Australian Film TV and Radio School with an MA(Honours) in Film and TV Documentary in 2006 and since has managed to win a number of awards for his efforts including Best Achievement in Indigenous Filmmaking at St Kilda Film Festival in 2007 for his debut student film B.L.A.C.K. and The John Newfong Media Prize for Best Indigenous work in 2009 for his documentary, Freakshow to Big Top. In 2010 Sonic Nomad won the scholarship for Indigenous excellence at the ABC, which allowed him to advance his craft into Editing, Directing, Producing, Camera, TV presenting and web production at AFTRS, NIDA and Dynamic Web Training.

With this new set of skills and experience along with the Out There and Deadly emerging Indigenous filmmakers fund provided by Metro Screen, Sonic Nomad has been able to co-write, direct, produce, co-edit, sound design and mix a TV Comedy Pilot/ online mini-series called Whiteblackatcha. This latest effort from Sonic Nomad is the result of a collaboration with his talented and comedic cousins Andrew Saunders and Jay Davis, who are the co-writers and peformers, along with English born multi-tasker Marc Foi. WhiteBLACKatcha not only showcases their talent and hard work, but also their sick sense of humour.

Apart from his TV work, Sonic Nomad is a singer/songwriter and fronts a message funk band called Whitehouse who released their debut album ‘A Funky Intervention’ on iTunes in April 2012. The band has been together since 2006 but Saunders has been writing for and fronting a number of musical acts since the early 90′s. It was Sonic Nomad’s passion for music and song writing that led him into soundtrack production and more recently into film-making.

Sonic Nomad finds an equal balance between his passions for music, sound and vision and is able to comfortably front and manage his band while creating and producing documentaries, comedy, TVC’s and music videos. Teaching media is a more recent passion for Saunders and one that he finds equally as compelling as the art of producing media itself and is teaching the Certificate III in Creative Industries (media) at Singleton Campus, exclusively for Indigenous students on a part-time basis.

Please take the time to explore this site to see and hear a selection of quality film, TV and music work that Sonic Nomad has produced over the past decade