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.