Well it seems I left my blog for dead for a while there, in the corner of disregarded attempts along with my new year’s resolutions and gym memberships.

But with a new uni semester comes new assessable requirements to force the writers hands again.

Somewhere between the crazed scrawling of essays to prove competence and the infuriating dealings with unbelievably inept buraecrats at the Brazilian Embassy in Canberra to try to get my visa (seriously they make a 70min hold time to Centrelink seem like efficiency) I am required to pause and reflect on the process of production for the Media 3 component of my Bach. Comms. Media degree.

Specifically, within the new studio/workshop style structure of the course, the course titled, The Art of Persuation: Politics and Poetics in Documentary, which applies a practical approach to production and assessing of documentaries. This post is basically going to be an unfiltered rant to try to both kickstart my blog again and clear my mind of the clutter that’s frustrating me, there’s not likely to be too many pearls of wisdom or hidden insightful gems here.

After a pretty lousy attempt at team work for the first submission of both a produced found footage and original footage 2 min doco, I find myself flying solo on the production of the next submission.

Before discussing the migraine inducing restrictions of the brief for this second submission, I think it’s worth reflecting on the monumental f*ck-ups of the first. What is it that turns every group assessment task at university into a sh*t fight to assert dominance and take control, or dry run for a funeral, seriously either an exercise in carry dead weight or such a disappointment I want the people who I did there group projects with to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time. Why is every group assessment like this?

I think largely it’s a problem where joint ownership means less individual ownership and so less personal investment, but in the case of this assessment I think it was largely the disparity in timetabling between the 3 group members. Uni is not like secondary college or even TAFE where you’re probably running on a really similar timetable, and going to all the same classes, instead you see these people for all of 3 hours a week, they don’t want to come to anything outside of class time, and you’re expected to collaborate to come to a joint creative outcome?

After weeks of trying to agree on what we wanted these short docos to actually say, we still had only a vague abstraction of a theme for each and a poorly delegated structure of production whereby there was no space for creative input or collaboration and therefore little to no ownership of the produced pieces for two out of three group members.

So, moving forward from that mess I was excited to be free of the constraints of negotiating a group structure while trying to produce a creative piece of content.

But you’re never out of the woods of constraints so long as there is a uni assessment brief involved.

This assignment asks students to produce a short documentary that either makes a political ask or provides a social critique, no time limit… sounds good so far. The piece is to comply with 3 of the 4 following restraints: (here we go)

1. NO VOICE-OVER NARRATION
2. NO INTERVIEWS
3. BE MADE OF FOUND FOOTAGE ONLY
4. NOT BE PHOTO-REALISTIC

Great… This is supposed to result in students thinking creatively, and experimenting. I can appreciate that introducing a problem discourages students just creating something tried and tired. I can appreciate that problem solving is a creative process and requires creative ways around the problem. But goddamn, when there’s just a few weeks to put it together while trying to do essays and readings for several other classes and working to pay off travel and keep the roof over your head the creative juices are not really flowing under the stress hormones.

So it’s a question of content and form…
It feels natural to select the content first.

If I select content that is appealing to me surely the rest will be easy.

So, I review my past few weeks on Facebook, what current political issues have I been passionate about? There are a lot. There’s a chunk of feminist issues, a lot on climate change, there’s a couple of interesting articles out of left field about the perceptions of childless couples that I find fascinating, there’s a lot about SBS firing Scott McIntyre and my disdain for the nationalist and christian tones that dominated the ANZAC service I attended.

So perhaps the exploration of the rhetoric around ANZAC day and the ANZAC spirit is a good area to hone in on… With the centennial coinciding with a renewed military commitment to Australian forces in Iraq, with Scott McIntyre being fired for challenging the official dogmatic story, there could be a lot of material to work with.

Initially I think that I can make a found footage piece with no interviews and no narration for this and this could work well, but I struggle to accept that I can explore the range of ideas to come out of this topic in the depth I’d like to without narration.

While I sat on the idea mulling it over I went to work on the 3 day conference ‘Progress 2015’, 3 days at Melbourne Town Hall of amazing, inspiring, challenging keynote plenaries, panels, workshops and conversations around a whole range of progressive ideas, many that were on my original list of ideas for topics. My brain was in overload coming out of this, the overarching theme to come out of the weekend was clear: The Progressive movement, as an alternative to the neoliberal and conservative agenda was failing because of division. There is something fascinating in this and feel I need to attempt to unpack it and repackage it for this assessment. (keynotes addresses can all be found on vimeo)

A single progressive movement seems a nebulous notion, why were all these people coming together for this event, people concerned with digital freedoms and rights, climate change, human rights, healthcare, childcare and education. There were activists and advocates, CEOs and boardmembers, campaigners and charities. There had to be a common thread, what was it and could it be sufficient to investigate as the core content of my piece?

Several workshops that I worked on provided me with some starting points. A federal budget coordination workshop suggested we’re all divided and fighting one another for the scraps of funding offered in neoliberal budgets. The panel suggested that the progressive movement needs to rethink the language we use as a whole, that have been talking in the neoliberal and conservative frame, rather than talking about cuts and surpluses, about “the” budget like an entity, and fighting over funding our thing or your thing, we should be appealing to people to review how they see the budget, rather than as an entity, to see it as a reflection of what we believe is a good society.

This specific goal of re-framing progressive’s budget language was something I agreed was necessary, it was a political ask and a social critique, but what form could this take?

As I write this I am still totally unclear what the answer to that question is. Considering the 3 out of 4 requirement, and the specific goal of this piece being to provoke the viewer to re-examine how they view the budget, to ask progressives to review the language they use, and to promote a unified alternative to neoliberalism rather than a disparate collection of causes, how do I do this? How do I convince without narration, how to I validate without interviews, how do I illustrate without creating footage, or how do I ground it without photo-realism?

Perhaps the answer lies in digging deeper into the topic, the form will come from the content perhaps? If I can work out some key messaging, I can perhaps consider how to express it within these constraints.

Some key points from the federal budget panel that inspired some Facebook posts and quotes are perhaps worth revisiting? Note: This blog post has now entered collating and brainstorming space where I’m literally planning my piece as I go, sort of a stream of consciousness, brace for lack of linear direction.

FB POST: “Fairness” is subjective, don’t argue against the budget on “fairness”. It worked for the last 12 months only because the Coalition went after everyone at once and were really bad at their messaging, they won’t make the same mistake again, and we shouldn’t count on it. Fairness is problematic because we can say it’s “unfair that the rich are getting tax breaks” they can say it’s “unfair the unemployed are getting their tax dollars”