Shoots #2 and #3

This was the shoot. The hardest shoot in the schedule. And I'm so happy that everything went smoothly.

The shooting location was Jamieson and the surrounding area, about 50 km out of Mansfield and nearly four hours drive from Melbourne. It was always going to be a hard slog. On the drive there we decided to take a quick detour and check out Kinglake, where I had planned top grab a few quick shots of the fire-ravaged town. This posed a few problems, mainly those of the ethical variety. We wondered if it was 'right' to take footage of a town that was engulfed in a fire that claimed many lies, and we were still questioning this as we ate lunch in the town centre. Following a quick chat, I decided to move a few kilometres out of the town centre and pull off the road and take a few shots of the trees down there, well out of the way of any people and properties. It was raining and we didn't want the camera to get wet, which is where my car's sun shield came in to help out! (see below)


Following this we took a few shots whilst driving, before turning our attention to the cabin at Jamieson. When we got there it was action stations right away. It was getting late in the day, and the sun wasn't piercing through the cloud cover at all, so for light reasons we had to get our act together quickly. But it was absolutely pouring. We sat, wet and cold, in the cabin's lounge whilst everyone waited for me to make a decision. I almost leaned towards postponing shooting to the next day, but realised we'd be up against time and so decided to brave it. It was quite possibly the best choice of the trip. We shot some fantastic footage, including a sweeping long take of damien's character approaching the cabin, and assorted other shots outside the cabin. The light had exhausted itself completely just as we finished filming, and so we adjourned inside for a quick break before shooting the internal cabin scenes.
The internal scenes required a bit of set-dressing and lighting setups to be managed, but after a while we achieved a great balance, and along with the already fantastic ornaments lining the cabin walls, the place looked great. This part of the shoot went incredibly smoothly and after a few hours we sat down for a lovely spaghetti dinner and a few beers, and talked over the next day of shooting. We worked out that the next day we would have to endure a 30 minute uphill climb to the mine, whilst also filming selected shots along the way, before shooting a few road scenes, returning to the cabin for one or two final shots, before packing and leaving. We knew it was going to be tough to fit it all in so we went to bed.



After grabbing batteries for the mixer from Jamieson, we set off on the walk. Along the way we found a burnt out old van so we used it to grab a few quick shots before continuing the uphill climb. Strange as it may be, we battled against the sun at some points, as it kept peeking through the clouds and destroying the overcast look we were trying to achieve. It soon retreated however, and we got a few more shots of Damien walking and some really cool sounds from a nearby mine interest. After a tough, sweaty climb, we eventually reached the top and found the old mine.




We got some great shots and then descened back down the mountain to have lunch at the cabin. Time was agasint us, and we had to shoot some shots with the car. We budgeted for about 45 minutes, but quickly realised it would take just a bit longer when the car battery died. Yep. Awesome. When this happened, Damien jumped in the driver's seat as me and liam pushed the car off the side of the road and manouvered it so that it was on the road, facing downhill. We then ran and pushed as hard as we could, and sighed with relief as the car's engine burst into life when Damien popped the clutch. We finished off this shot, before returning to the cabin and grabbing some wilds, and heading off on the long journey home.

It was a fantastic couple of shoots, and we got around 2 and a half hours of superb footage that I've been painstakingly going through. I have to thank Elise, Liam and Damien for all their hard work, and I can't wait to get into the suites and start editing!

Shoot #1- Bushrangers Bay

Last week was the first shoot day for my project, and the location was Bushranger's Bay in Cape Schanck. The location is not only an hour and a half (at the least) from the city, but the main shooting area is a 45 minute trek down the winding bushranger's path, and due to the fact that we were only able to pick up the gear at around 12pm, we were going to be very hard pressed to get all the shooting done before light failed us.




The walk is really rather beautiful, taking you through fields before returning to the coast and dipping accross small creeks. The sun came out for a bit, but quickly disappeared behind thick grey clouds. When this occurred, we were met by what can only be described as the best of weather, and the worst of weather. The wind pickjed up ferociously and whipped the sand around us, swaying the trees and delivering the occasional shower. Thankfully though, the rain held off and were left with these windy, dark and overcast skies, which were perfect for the film. Just not so perfect for the walk. When you eventually come out of the shrubs, you are met by the most amazing vista: a white, sandy beach completely free of any sign of human life.





We got all the shots we needed on the walk, and then took some fantastic ones down on the beach. There was a moment when we had to wait for a ship to get out of our shot, but everything went really smoothly, and we prepared to pack up and start the long walk back to the car. And then it happened. I found one of my shoes, but the other was missing. After quizzing Damien and Liam to see where they'd hit it, I slowly began to realise that it had actually been taken by the sea, the sneaky tide that crept up on us as the day wore on. So I was left with one shoe, and did what any man would do in such circumstances: get my recoursefulness on and tie a plastic bag to my foot. Needless to say, it was the most uncomfortable walking experience of my life, yet Damien and Liam found it hilarious. I didn't really mind though, because I knew we had nailed this shoot.

Drains

Here's a view images of some drains I checked out near Gardiner.

Meeting with Damien

Last week I met with one of the members of the brainstrust, Damien, and we thrashed out our ideas over a nice cup of tea and a few too many cigarettes. With his help we refined my concept considerably. It is no longer looking at a destroyed city through focused eyes, but instead looking at it in a more abstract way. I will not make any mention about what is going or why there aren't people around and why everything's so grimy and grotty, but will rather film them and let the viewer decide what is going on. I'm starting to think about it in a more self-reflexive (yeah I cringed when I wrote that too) manner, and examining why this concept attracted me in the first place. Alienation. Isolation. This is how I feel when I'm living in this city sometimes, so essentially while the character will be exploring the darker sides of Melbourne, I will be exploring the darker places of my conciousness.

The Abandoned Car Park

Recently I did some location scouting and found this old abandoned car park which would be perfect for the film, so I decided to take a few snaps. The car park itself is multi-tiered, with the bottom level covered with a generous layer of water, muck and debris. It's so quiet down there, and the feeling definitely matches the tone of my piece.

Moving things along

Exploration is the name of the game folks, and it starts right here, on the web. I've been checking through photos and such on flickr and have been attempting to locate some cool spots to film fragments. So far i have found a place in kensington that will look great on camera, as well as a mental asylum in Bundoora. The various drains I have mapped out to shoot in include Burwood, Moonee Ponds and Kooyong. I have also discovered a great, abandoned underground car park that will be perfect for this project. The next step is creating custom stories for each one and working out shooting plans, as well as taking more photos and posting them here.

I'm now thinking of having everything presented in two ways. One will be a straight up film connected by a VO narration, the other will be the fragmented way that will include a lot more interaction. I can best sum this up with one particular section.

If we go back to the car on the beach scene, presented in the film it will be different sections meshed up, but in the fragmented story it will be an ezedia clip where users can click on different items on the dash and different movies will play. I really want to get on with filming this extremely soon.

Video Intro

This video has been designed to highlight the mood and themes that i'll be aiming for with this project. I think it's a great little introductory clip as it really taps into this notion of emptiness and destruction and basically, the end of the world, which is what Melbourne 2038 is all about.

Oh yes, and before you all say OMG copyright infringement well duh i already know, hence why its on my own server and not an RMIT one. This is a developmental blog, and i think using video/images when I haven't gathered my own content yet is a perfect way to show what I'm trying to do.

The music and narration is an excerpt from a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song called 'The Dead Flag Blues'.

The Black and white footage is from Chris Marker's film La Jetee.

The final shot is from the upcoming film The Road.

Other stuff includes found photos and footage from the Melbourne g20 protests.

Thoughts

The Issue of Lights

I'm pretty awesome, but even I don't have the ability to turn off the power grid. So how will I explain the issue of the lights being on during my night shots?

After watching The Omega Man with Charlton Heston the other week (another dystopian apocalypse movie) I had the idea of having enemies in my piece. I'm not talking well-defined, crazed zombies...but something more vague, something referenced but never established, occasionally seen buit never undesrtood. Maybe in some of the videos you'll get a glimpse of them, but they'll never be presented as 'these are nuclear fallout radiocative killer zombies'. So how does this relate to the issue of lights? Well I developed a short scene that I can use.

"The Lights came on again last night. After four months of complete darkness. When everything broke down, there was no-one to man the grids, and slowly they failed, one by one. But last night they came back on again, and I don't which is scarier, the time they went out...or the fact that someone out there turned them back on."

Central Protagonist

I had the idea of linking every fragment to a single protagonist, so that we see everything through his eyes. But it has pros and cons. On the plus side, it ties the project down to a solid, relatable lead, and it will be easier to follow. On the negative side, it does limit the way each story will be told, as everything will have to be from this man's perspective. It's something that I will have to discuss further with my peers.

I have decided that this project will be a solo one. However it is a lot to undertake, and so I have sourced help from Elise, Damien, Liam and Garner, four peepes who I trust completely to nail down the aesthetics of my piece.

Latest ideas

I guess, in a sense, it's good that all the ideas I come up with are fragmented in themselves. When I'm brainstorming I develop really strong, individual ideas that work well alone. Here's a few of them:

An Exit

A Photograph taken from inside a car. On the dashboard: smokes, empty beer cans, a bottle of jack with a third left, a photo of family members, some prescription pills. The car door is open. A beach scene is evident through the windscreen. The sound of the ocean, the waves lapping against the sand, the wind echoing around the deserted landcape. The sky is dark and overcast. Clothes are strewn over the beach, leading directly towards the sea.

Logistics

I'd say this will be narrated by a letter left by the man who went into the sea, maybe talking about the current state of the world, the reasons for why he left, I guess it would be a suicide note of sorts. Like most of the project, I'm still throwing up about whether to shoot this as one photo or video or both.
The influence, and I would say a massive influence on this, is the cover of Anathema's album A Fine Day to Exit. As soon as I saw it just struck me as completely haunting, and I feel it would suit the project well If i recreated it and added some additional touches of my own.







The Fire and The Earth

I was thinking about heading out to the fire hit areas of Victoria and taking some footage of the scorched landscape, and using it as a way of backing up this idea of the apocalypse. While it's not 'Melbourne', strictly speaking, it would have a great role in bringing a sense of destruction and loss to the project, and fits in with the central idea of reappropriation.














The Kings of the Industrial World

I was thinking about filming some stuff down near the factories and dock areas, just because the big buildings and other architecture really reinforce the idea of loneliness.

Influences

I guess one of the key things of my pp2 project idea links in with the fragmented nature of dotdotdot. It’s the element of the unknown, the ambiguous. I don’t want people to be able to get a complete picture of what the situation is in Melbourne. I don’t want them to know if it’s restricted to Melbourne or the rest of the country, or the rest of the world. And I don’t want them to know why and how this has happened. I want it to remain a mystery. Was it a disease (Children of Men, 28 days Later)? Or something else entirely? How many survivors are there out there? I want this project to stimulate these kind of questions yet provide no simple answers. I am aiming to draw people into this world I’m creating without giving them the full picture. On that note, I thought I should probably list some of my major influences.

La Jetee
28 Days Later
Lessons of Darkness
The Road (book)
Armageddon’s Children (Book)
Headhunter: Redemption (VG)
I am Legend
Silent Hill (VG)
Children of Men

I’ve also been thinking about what, and whom, I will need for this project, and what this project means. This project means walking around at 4am in the morning, camera in hand. This project means sleepless nights and a biiiiig workload. But this project is so in tune with me and what I, personally, find interesting. I mean I fucking jog through empty parks at 11pm at night (coincidentally, or maybe not so, I just returned from a jog, and jogged past the footy park and it was so cold that a thick layer of mist covered the ground, pierced only by the occasional passing cars headlights. It was so freaking cool). I am obsessed with not the presence of space, but rather the inherent absence, the emptiness within that space. And as I will be in my final semester, I will be putting my all into this, and as arrogant as it sounds, I want almost complete creative control. I will be taking the entire semester off work for this. That said, I will definitely need help. I’ve been sounding out my ideas to other students, and have already talked to my composer friend about creating a soundtrack for the project. I would love an experienced photographer to help me out with certain parts, and I will definitely source help from others, but I really think I want to be doing most of the work for this by myself.

So where do I go now? I have to get an example of what I’m trying do out there soon, and I think this will be a trailer of sorts. The biggest problem when pitching an idea is that it’s hard to convey all the passion that you have to an audience, and as unfortunate as it is, shit, unoriginal ideas gain support simply because of the fact that people can so easily relate to them, because they are already familair with them on some level. So for this trailer, i’ll take some photos, add in a short audio piece, and have a narration introducing this future world. At the end, the narrator will say something like:

“Welcome to Melbourne, 2038″

Melbourne 2038

During a boredom-on-train inspired brainstorming sesh today, I came up with this tentative title for my pp2 project, along with some further ideas. I was thinking about how I would present this project in it’s final form, and the idea of a map came up. Damien’s group are potentially deciding upon whether or not they are going to use a map to highlight where the t-shirt has been for their pp1 project, so that you click on a location and it plays the video/photos that were shot there with the shirt. For mine, I was thinking of doing something like this. The important thing I have to focus on is making every aspect of this project link in with the overall theme. So this could mean that I would scan a hand-drawn map onto the computer, a map drawn by one of the last people surviving in Melbourne. It would feature familiar Melbourne landmarks, and show specific routes that the survivor uses to avoid danger. For instance, it could have a drain network highlighted on the map, and you could click on that and it would take you to a video piece I’ve filmed down the in the drains, where people from this new world now reside.

I then could form a history to these places I focus on, maybe explaining the role they used to have and how that’s changed as humanity slowly dies. For the drains one, here’s a quick snippet, a rough sketch, of a voiceover that could accompany the drains part:

“After the fallout, survivors used the drain network to navigate the city. They had hubs at many of the intersections where they would hoard supplies gathered from above.”

This drains idea is one that I’ve been familiar with for a long time. As a kid, me and a few friends would go and explore the drains around our houses. It’s a strange and eerie feeling when you’re down there. It really seems that the world has gone out of existence, and all that remains is this musky, stale smell, the darkness and isolation of the underworld. It’s also really funny how fellow drain travellers depict their adventures through graffiti on the wall, and this creates a sort of local history for specific drains, understood only by the few who venture there. One day me and a friend read on a drain wall that there was something called ‘The Great Staircase’ at the end of one of the drains. It took us a while to get up the courage to check it out, but one day we grabbed our bags and torches and headed off. It was quite a long trek, and at certain sections the walls would close in, and we’d have to crawl to move forward before the drain opened back up. When it eventually did, we were encountered by a massive set of steps. Two thin rivultes of water streamed down either side, and the steps continued up into darkness. We were really in awe of how cool this was, this slice of local history at our feet. When we got to the top there was just another drain leading onwards, but it didn’t matter, we found what we were looking for.

In my last post I discussed the idea of linking Melbourne’s past to it’s future, and one thing I recently thought of was using footage from the g20 riots to show the beginning of the end. To reappropriate this piece of history and turn it into a climatic event that represented the decline of humanity and the end of life in Melbourne.

Finally, another example of a piece for my project has almost been fully formed in my head. It will be a photo of a broken TV or radio, lying in the middle of the street, with no-one around. When the photo is up online, people will be able to click it and a video or audio piece will play, which will be a news report of when things went sour for Melbourne, and I guess, the world at large.

Original Idea

I guess the main thing that I keep coming back to in relation to this project is taking a video, photo, sound clip etc. from a specific location and twisting it to the point where it’s context becomes historically abstract, and to a certain extent, bringing it into the realm of the unknown. This idea was reinforced by watching Chris Marker’s La Jetee last week, a film that I’ll unashamedly admit I’m a tad obsessed with. Think of the scenes of Paris in ruins. These shots are from World War II, but are presented as the world in ruins following World War 3. Marker has taken an important aspect of history, and specifically Paris, and thrown it into a new historical context, a future world. It is this idea of connotation and appropriation that I am interested in.

I want to look at Melbourne with the fresh eyes of a tourist, and present an unknown time period, potentially a future, drawn from contemporary shots of the city. You know when you have those rare moments of awareness when you look at your surroundings in a new light? This happened to me a few weeks ago. I was coming back to the city by myself from a house party in Fitzroy. Someone had stolen the beers I left in the sink, and so I was oddly sober for a saturday night. As I walked along Swanston street the rain started driving down in sheets. Accross the road Police were dragging two guys away from a fight, and there was a drunk guy spewing in an alley to my right. Police lights lit up the darkness and mixed in with the shop lights spilling out onto the pavement and highlighting the worn faces of the homeless guys lying at their entrances. And for one second I really thought I was in some sort of Dystopian future. Time just slowed to a halt. This is the feeling I want to convey through my project. Think about 28 Days later. Those shots of an empty London are exactly how I want this project to be like. Danny Boyle took a city and turned it upside down through careful artistic devices, giving the city a whole new meaning.

So this is a lot of incoherent rambling I know, but I’m getting to the main core essence of my project. The concept is to have one overriding theme that links all the pieces together. For me, as evidenced by my prior example, it is to take Melbourne and carefully turn it into a dystopic future. I’m talking about capturing the grime, the dirt, the isolation and emptiness, the parts of Melbourne you don’t see in the travel brochures. And from this, I want to tell a fragmented story. Each photo, each audio piece, each video, will serve as the starting point for a story. Each story can be different and self-contained, but will link to the overtonal theme of a Melbourne exempt from it’s current position in space and time. In a nutshell, it will be various pieces of work focusing on the darker parts of melbourne and accompanied by a story influenced by the captured work (story can be represented by text, audio, video). The individual stories don’t have to have a beginning or resolution, they can come in anywhere and leave at anytime, linking in with the fragmented nature of this task.

This idea stems from a concept I established in pp1, where I tell a story about the smiley face through pictures and text and audio. You can see it on my blog here .

One of the important things I would love to link in with this project is the idea of history and it’s connection to the future. Marker made a future Paris with images from a past Paris, indicating that on some level we are destined to make the same mistakes. So I think If i found a connection between a past Melbourne and the dystopic future I’m attempting to portray, then it would be a cool theme to establish.

I hope this makes sense? i’ll try to elaborate upon further down the track, and in ‘better’ writing too. Gotta love that irony just there. God I’m hungover.

Mike out

oooooooooh I almost forgot another fantastic example. Werner Herzog’s pseudo-doco Lessons of Darkness. The way it takes a place like Iraq and turns it into a futuristic sci-fi with just documentary footage and careful narration is so fantastic and enthralling. It is another piece of work that will I look at closely for this project.