Stuff we have done

We found this great site on Bourke street, the old half of myer was being are torn down but the certain structures were still required by the Heritage Register to be present, according to the builders we talked to.

                                                                        Photos taken off Shushan's phone

We also did our first interview with Mike. Unfortunately, Lorna wasn't present and so we only had the opportunity to speak to him.

As discussed in the last post, we were going for a more emotional approach to our documentary. However, as Shushan was interviewing Mike, I realised that his answers to her questions were very technical. Even when she tried to explore something that couldn't be explained technically, he still gave a very textbook answer. Yet at the same time, he was asking us what we wanted him to say...

It was an example of how hard an interview could go. It was really hard directing and steering him in the right direction.

As I was struggling with the boom mike, I was hoping he would speed up his answers and get to the good bits!!

Well, not to fret, we still have Lorna! We met her briefly and she seems to be more emotive. Hopefully we will go better when we interview her!

First shoot at Westwyck

We had our first glimpse inside Westwyck.

The old primary school campus was so big that half our group was on one end, and the other half was on the other and we were rather lost as all of us thought that we were at the front end of the school. Turns out, we were on the end where it was still the old primary school without any work having been done, and the other half of our team was on the end of the newly constructed eco village!

the old end we were on on victoria street

Mike Hill with a map of Westwyck

To be honest, it was pretty intimidating meeting with Mike in the first place as he was very in charge of the situation and he has seen so many people come and go who have interviewed him, or like us, want to make a short documentary about the place.

He questioned our angle, and if the idea of sustainable reuse was too broad. I think we all agreed with him when we heard what he had to say.

The problems we faced when thinking of an angle was that we didn't want it to be a promotional video for Westwyck if we went for that angle. We already that bad experience when it came to filming Taka and him giving us what he wanted to be on tape rather than what we wanted, despite our efforts to provoke and probe.

Also, as Mike said, if we did the sustainable angle, it could be really general, and also, be too much of a kind of environmentally friendly promotional video, and as much of a good thing being environmentally friendly is, we didn't want our doco to be so general without an interesting angle.

After much brainstorming, I think we all agreed that the history of Westwyck, and the fact that it went from a primary school to a totally different thing was amazing. And in a way, that was using the sustainable reuse angle, but from more of an emotive angle and less of a promotive one.

Talking to Liam was great as well, as he gave us a really good idea of using the concept of 'ghosts' in a  place. Meaning, a place has so much history. This place where these residents are staying used to be classrooms where children ran up and down playing and screaming.

All of us loved that, and so we decided to go with it.

Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux is a somewhat popular documentary maker with the BBC. Having caught some of his work on free-to-air TV on SBS, I thought it would be apt to mention him on this blog.

Theroux largely covers a large range of what is deemed as socially controversial issues, such as the lives
of prostitutes behind closed doors, asian catalogue brides, racist families, and more.
Here's an example of the one about Thai Brides.

His documentaries can be categorised as 'participatory documentaries', as the audience can see how he is in them, and the way he affects his subjects or interviewees. On the same note, this other documentary is on the similar topic of Thai Brides, but has much more of an expository style, with one side being shown, and a voice narrating the story to the audience.

We had to think about whether or not we wanted a narrator, or even an interviewer present in the span of our documentary on Westwyck.

However, it was more unanimous to go with a more observational style for the documentary as we wanted to tell a story of adaptive reuse, using Westwyck, but without any sense of us being in it.

Change of doco idea

So, our Taka idea turned out to be heading to a dead end so we had no choice but to go with a different idea for our documentary. Shushan, our director, had been on a field trip to East Gippsland recently for a school field trip where they were helping the farmers plant some trees around their farmland.

While they were at that, she happened to have a chat with some of the farmers who were involved in this movement called LandCare. From there, I think the idea of shooting a documentary based on the idea of sustainable living came up. We brainstormed on how we could go from here. At first, we were considering driving up to East Gippsland but soon realised that with our time restraint, as well as our lack of access to a car, as the producer, I felt that we were better off shooting something within the proximity of public transport.

That is where Westwyck Village comes in. Owned by owners Mike and Lorna, Westwyck is an eco friendly village in Brunswick. It used to be an old primary school but the owners have turned in into sustainable housing for the public.

It would be interesting to see where we go from here!