One of the strangest parts of the process was during production filming B-roll in neighbours houses, our concept changed a number of times, one of the later developments was a revised mood board. I created a mood board of images to help try to direct the development of a story board. It was a collection of mostly macro photos of various visual elements that came to mind when I thought of home. I guess I created it as something to generate a discuss in the group but it became quite a central element of the process.

It contained images of keys on the kitchen counter or hall stand in various homes, shoes beside the doors, mail on the coffee table, an unmade bed. Representations of home in small objects, none of the images contained people. This I think was my way to explore both the faceless nature of Asylum Seekers, and the way in which the physical experience of home occurs in universal ways.

I wanted to show things which could be ANYONE’S home. Everyone with a home has keys to the door. Everyone goes to sleep, and if you have a home, you sleep in a bed generally. A doormat at the door or a pair of shoes could be anyone’s and the front door is a very symbolic image, and barrier or boundary, of the home. I wanted to show these homes as lived in, but not the people who lived in them. As much as our message had started as Home being MORE than a house, much of the audio captured in interview contrasted a home to a house, suggesting home as a concept removed from the physicality of a house. I didn’t feel this actually fit with what Lentara does, because they actually are so focused on providing a house. In fact a number of times it was raised that a house, a physical address, was the key foundation to their support, once, and only once, that was provided THEN they could go above and beyond that and help build that house into a new home for these people. I think the interviews we did with friends asking what a home meant to them failed to consider this. When they said “home isn’t a place”, the were all people who had never had the experience of being without the physical place that underscored the conceptual feeling of home.

In an effort to capture audio that more accurately represented this idea I took to fiverr.com with a script and actually paid 6-7 voice over artists to record a script, the audio from these was not used in the final presentations, and around the same time the problems with what we had captured were becoming apparent and the purpose or aims of our campaign were coming back into question with a lack of clarity around our call to arms, and I think we also lost sight of who our audiences were and whether we were strategically targeting them at this time.

In any event, I did manage to get a lot of great footage inside neighbours homes by dropping a letter in everyone’s letterboxes explaining the project and what I wanted to film with some sample images of the kinds of shots, and then knocking on their doors with my camera a few days later.