- Please read each description carefully.
- Check the studio times against your other commitments (these are subject to change, but this is unlikely)
- There is only one ONLINE-ONLY studio running this semester. If you cannot come to campus at all, you must enrol in this studio. Preference will be given to offshore students.
Entangling Media
Telling creative non-fiction narratives using multimedia forms
| Monday | 10.2.62 | 2:30-5:30pm |
| Thursday | 12.2.104 | 11:30am-1:30pm |
Mesh – a photo by Uriel SC on Unsplash
“For the creator of stories, how does this distributed concept [of storytelling] affect the composition process? What does it mean to build a narrative in a universe shaped by transmedia and the networked book?” Bryan Alexander (2011)
Studio Prompt
How does narrative form change the way we tell and engage with a creative nonfiction story? How and why might a blended multimedia form of creative nonfiction storytelling impact the way the story is told and understood?
Studio Description
In a highly networked era, storytelling has become more “porous” and the forms and platforms available for media makers and other storytellers ever more complex and interesting. “Where a story begins and ends, what the container is that holds a narrative,” writes media scholar Bryan Alexander, “these questions are more difficult to answer than before” (2011: 125). This studio will explore the opportunities for media makers for non-fiction storytelling that uses multiple media modes and tangles these together in innovative ways: media stories that explore the porous boundaries of stories.
Across the semester, you will produce small, iterative and explorative creative non-fiction multimedia stories that ‘test’ a number of different digital media storytelling tools such as scrollytelling, interactive maps, and websites, as well as the physical space of an exhibition or showcase. These stories may also explore different creative nonfiction forms but in media-based storytelling: essay, personal essay, nonfiction poetry etc. These stories might combine text, audio and/or video. Earlier in semester, you’ll use these small works to both research and develop story ideas and interests on an individual level, and later in semester you’ll work collaboratively with others in the class. The collaborative work will use tools explored earlier in the semester to tell a nonfiction story in either a blended multimedia format or across a variety of media modes. This work could take the form of a single multimedia work, a short series, or a variety of different media works that are linked together.
Studio leader
Sophie Langley is a fiction and nonfiction writer, sonic essay maker, photographer, sketcher and PhD candidate at RMIT. Her work is interested in the ways in which different types of knowledge, storytelling and media can be entangled to make new kinds of stories, particularly in response to some of the most urgent issues of our times, such as the climate crisis and social and technological changes. Her PhD project uses an entangled essaying approach, blending various media modes and ‘creative’ and ‘academic’ writing to explore embodied and material knowledges for patients in medical encounters. She has been teaching at RMIT for several years.
The Power of the Cut
What lies hidden in the cut between clips? Does the soul of a film exist in what we don’t see?
| Tuesday | 10.2.62 | 12.30 – 2.20 |
| Thursday | 10.2.62 | 9.30 – 12.30 |
“It is the very eloquence of the cinema that is constructed in the editing room.”
Orson Welles (Director: Citizen Kane, A Touch of Evil)
“You have to cut with your gut.”
Dede Allen (Editor: Serpico, The Breakfast Club)
Studio Prompt
How can the simple action of cutting images together be one of the most profound techniques in modern storytelling?
Studio Description
The history of screen editing is inexorably interwoven with the development and growth of the medium of cinema itself. Editing is storytelling with a razor.
In this studio we will be exploring screen editing as a storytelling tool through iterative activities both in, and outside, of our workshops. We will be examining editing from both philosophical and process-driven perspectives. The goal of our explorations will be to cultivate the students’ instincts through practice and provocation.
We will be investigating comprehensive systems and processes, through a deep and thorough understanding of the practicalities of editing preparation. Only from a secure foundation built on rigorous preliminary work, can a screen editor allow their instincts to truly flow freely.
Throughout the semester, we will work through different processes and styles used in scripted, improvised, documentary, genre and commercial content.
Students will learn to shape footage in service of The Story, to edit intentionally and intuitively. They will learn to reshape and refine their editing work, responding to external feedback and to their own reflection on their work. Towards the end of the course, students will build a series of edited works that will serve as a portfolio of the work undertaken throughout the semester.
Studio Leader
Sebastian Bertoli is a director, editor and actor. As a screen editor he edits both commercial and narrative screen content. He is about to commence editing feature film Disconnected. The first narrative work he edited, award-winning short Blue (2017), has had over 4 million views on YouTube. He has directed a dozen shorts across genres as diverse as erotic thriller, absurdist comedy and psychological horror. As an actor he has appeared on screen in productions from HBO, DreamWorks, Bad Robot, Warner Bros Television and ABC. Sebastian holds a 2017 Masters (Film & Television) from the Victorian College of the Arts.
Room With A View
Broadcast radio as a collaborative space and enduring audio medium
| Monday | 12.2.104 | 10:30am-1:30pm |
| Wednesday | 12.2.104 | 11:30am-1:30pm |
Adobe Stock Images.
“Radio’s present era is marked by a transformative new materiality, as digital platforms finally overcome the ephemerality that once made radio so hard to capture and assess as a cultural form; a new mobility, as radio moves across devices and into new spaces; and by a new globalism, as digital accessibility unleashes radio and extends it well beyond its former local and national boundaries. Radio has not only survived but revived, both as a creative medium and as a shared cultural experience.” (Hilmes 2013)
Studio Prompt
What is the role of radio in a globalised media environment that is dominated by screens? What forms and formats does modern radio take? And how can we produce compelling content for both “live” broadcast or streaming radio and on-demand listening?
Studio Description
For years now, critics have predicted the death of radio as a medium. However, despite these dire predictions not only has radio endured, it continues to matter deeply to the almost 3 billion people around the world who tune into it weekly. In Australia, community radio plays an important role in cultural life, providing a voice for communities that are not adequately serviced by other broadcasting sectors. Skills learned doing community radio are also readily transferrable to newer audio forms such as podcasting.
In this studio, run in partnership with Triple R FM, you will learn the skills required to produce live-to-air and pre-recorded radio, as well as consider the role of radio in the wider media landscape in Australia and globally.
Working in teams out of the Triple R radio studios, you will produce an “as-live” pre-recorded radio show that will broadcast in an early morning timeslot on Triple R FM. Each team will also produce a crafted radio feature targeted to the Triple R audience. You’ll also be asked to reflect upon questions around the social, cultural and political role of radio by examining concepts such as voice, representation, listening and accessibility – particularly in relation to community radio.
Students taking Room With A View must be able to attend the 3RRR radio studios in East Brunswick for panel training, practice sessions, and to record their radio shows.
Studio Leader
Heather Jarvis is a radio & podcast producer, journalist, PhD candidate and lecturer in Media Studies at RMIT. In her extensive career at the ABC and also in community radio, Heather produced and presented programs spanning from music and magazine-style shows through to current affairs and sport. He radio documentary work has been shortlisted for both the Amnesty International Australia Media Awards and the United Nations Media Awards.
Designing Drama
The practice of narrative film production
| Tuesday | 12.2.104 | 12:30-2:30pm |
| Thursday | 10.2.62 | 2:30-5:30pm |
“Evening, Honfleur”, 1886
(Detail, including frame)
Georges-Pierre Seurat
Studio Prompt
What are some of the variables in craft and motivation that account for the vast possibilities and expressive diversity in drama film production; and how much can we learn working together in this inquiry?
Studio quotes…
The following quotes indicate some of the perspectives that underpin our inquiry, and something of that inquiry’s potential trajectory.
“Without saying a word, he taught me that the important thing isn’t the story but how you tell it. That’s the whole foundation of cinema. It’s not the story but how it’s told.”
Rui Nogueira
Speaking about Jean-Pierre Melville in
Melville – Delon: d’honneur et de nuit (2011)
Dir. Olivier Bohler
“…for us fiction matters because if you combine it with documentary images or a documentary situation you get a contradiction where sparks can fly. Fiction is crucial to start the fire.”
Danièle Huillet
Quoted in the BFI obituary of Jean-Marie Straub
www.bfi.org.uk
….a single minute’s lyricism, the detail of a face, the surprise of a gesture, have always been, and always will be, capable of making us forget all kinds of wretched stories.”
René Crevel
“Battlegrounds and Commonplaces” in
The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema
Paul Hammond (ed. & trans.) City Lights, San Francisco, 2000
Studio Description
This studio is an inquiry into the realisation of screen drama. Our approach will be highly practical, experiential and fundamentally experimental. Taking pre-existing, connected narrative texts as raw material, we will make as many scenes as we can, and as many versions of those scenes as necessary, in order to develop an understanding of the filmmaking process. Studio members will participate repeatedly in all craft areas, including performance.
Film production tends to take the form of finite, project-based work. Mistakes and misjudgement are fundamentally irreparable. Lessons learnt can only be applied in the event of future, similar work. What if we were to approach the many crafts involved, in the manner of a musician or dancer – via instructive, risk-free, repetitive practice? Every class will involve such practice. Every completed scene will be explored, shaped and edited by every studio member. Interpretation of the evolving drama, by those behind and in front of the camera, will be an opportunity, responsibility and necessity for all. Through this process we will investigate the expressive potential of the medium.
Studio Leader
Robin Plunkett is a cinematographer. He has worked in all capacities in camera departments for more than 35 years. He also has experience as a producer, director (of non-fiction) and editor. For the last several years he has been teaching elements of cinematography, and film production in general, at the VCA and RMIT.
People + Places
Character and location in non-fiction media making
| Tuesday | 10.2.62 | 2:30-4:30pm |
| Wednesday | 12.2.104 | 3:30-6:30pm |
Daguerréotypes (1975, dir. Agnes Varda)
“If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument” – Eve Arnold, Magnum Photos
Studio Prompt
What are some of the ethical and technical considerations when we turn the camera towards characters and locations and describe our work as nonfiction?
Studio Description
In People + Places, students will engage in a variety of studio activities (including screenings, discussion, practical exercises, reflective tasks and media production) to explore the various ways in which non fiction materials can be arranged for different outcomes and audiences. The first half of the semester finds students researching and reflecting on various approaches to capturing the real world. In class, students will respond to the work of practitioners such as filmmakers Frederick Wiseman and Molly Dineen and photographers Eve Arnold and Martin Parr in a series of in class exercises. Along the way, students will evaluate and improve their media production skills. The second half of the semester finds students working in small groups to devise, pitch and produce a major work. This major work is usually a short documentary of 5 minutes duration but there is also scope to create a print or transmedia artefact.
Studio Leader
Rohan Spong is a writer / director / cinematographer whose feature length films ALL THE WAY THROUGH EVENING (2012) and WINTER AT WESTBETH (2016) have been released in cinemas (Australia, New Zealand & US), been broadcast on television (ABC, SBS, FOXTEL, 7PLUS and on PBS/WORLD) and selected by numerous film festivals (including MIFF, Sydney Film Festival, DOC NYC). His work has also been programmed at cultural institutions including ACMI, MONA, Boston Museum of Art, Lincoln Center (NYC) and the US Library of Congress.
You can read more about his work at www.rohanspong.com.
Ready Camera One
Multi-camera studio production
| Monday | 10.2.62 | 12:30-2:30pm |
| Wednesday | 10.2.68 | 1:30-4:30pm |
‘My Life in Four Cameras’, d. Adam Bernstein, Scrubs (created by Bill Lawrence), orig. broadcast 15 Feb 2005.
“Screens abound, from your pocketbook to the wall, the ceiling, the corner, and the stadium. They bring images and sounds from elsewhere in order to tell journalistic, financial, historical, musical, dramatic, sexual, and athletic stories. That’s television. And it is likely to continue, subject to change and disruption in both local and universal ways.” (Toby Miller, “Future Perfect TV – And TV Studies”, The Routledge Companion to Global Television, edited by Shawn Shimpach, Routeldge, 2020, p.86)
Studio Prompt
What are the creative possibilities and challenges of multi-camera television production, and how can multi-camera production practices be applied beyond the studio?
Studio Description
Multi-camera production is a persisting mode of television today. A significant proportion of media content, from sports coverage, news, special event television, variety/late night, reality and talk programs continues to make use of the multi-camera production format.
Through reading, viewing, discussion and practice, this studio will explore the creative possibilities and challenges of a multi-camera television production in a studio environment. Through a combination of ‘live to tape’ and non-live production exercises, you will investigate the different ways in which the multi-camera studio can be used. You will gain an understanding of TV studio production workflows and technology, developing your skills and experience through project work. Drawing from key ideas within television studies, you will also explore the histories of television broadcast and contemplate the future(s) of television in a post-network and post-broadcast era.
There will be a range of smaller projects produced in the studio that explore different possibilities and forms of multi-camera production, such as news, talk shows, sitcoms and game shows. We will explore the ways in which television broadcast is adapting to new and emerging media contexts, and how we can adapt the multi-camera environment to suit these contexts.
Studio Leader
Dr Ruth Richards completed her PhD in Media and Communication at RMIT in 2019. Her thesis explored the intersections of feminist theory and animation by examining the materiality of animated bodies. Her research interests include feminist animation, women in late night television, and film theory. Ruth has published on animation and memory, the early histories of cinema and animation, and the animated horror of violent clowns. Ruth has a background in multi-camera production through community broadcasting and has taught studios in live media, news satire, fact-checking and fake news, and automated societies.
Real-World Media
Finding and crafting stories between and beyond the ubiquitous digital
| Tuesday | 10.2.62 | 9:30am-12:30pm |
| Thursday | 13.1.3 | 1:30-3:30pm |
“As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return—the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvelous service.”
Michael Harris, The End of Absence (2014), Penguin.
Studio Prompt
Do we really need the digital to be creative?
This studio will explore questions of old/new media, material culture, and the potential for telling stories in a mixture of modalities both digital and real-world.
We will consider questions like:
- What is ‘craft’? Why is it a marker of quality?
- What is old/new media? Do we need this distinction?
- What are the benefits and drawbacks of using non-digital tools and methods?
- Do we really need the digital to be creative?
- Can we work with digital tools as just one part of a broader suite of creative activities, being something that we can incorporate into our work only when needed?
- How do we tell compelling stories about craftspeople?
- How can we tell stories across digital and non-digital plaftorms?
To address and discuss these questions, we will explore notions of craft, quality, nostalgia, and consideration in our media-making and the making of others. You will experiment with crafted forms of story-making, as well as watching and telling stories about those who craft. We will begin with theories of the post-digital and new materialism, but you will then take these ideas further in your own research-led practice.
You will produce work in a variety of formats, including film/video, photography, poetry, interactive narrative, board game, or almost anything else! There will be plenty of time spent discussing our work with our peers, building our skills in delivering constructive and detailed feedback on each other’s work. We will also hear from special guests who are researching and/or working with physical media and mixed methods.
Studio Leader
Dr. Daniel Binns is a theorist of media and screen cultures, currently researching the intersection of materiality, computation, and entertainment. He has previously run Media studios on cross-media storytelling, the cinematic frame, and immersive media. He is the author of The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq (2017), and Material Media-Making in the Digital Age (2021). Daniel has also worked as a screenwriter, director, producer and production manager on corporate films, television documentaries, multi-sensory experiences and short-form works.
Sound Futures
Eco-techno approaches to sound and listening
| Tuesday | 12.2.104 | 2:30-4:30pm |
| Friday | 10.2.62 | 2:30-5:30pm |
“…sonic worlds that offer an alternative view—a possible and even an impossible view—challenging and augmenting what we pragmatically refer to as the actual world”
“Sound is different…in that it does not propose something but does something. It is neither a representation of an actual event nor the construction of a possible event, but is an event in all its possibilities.”
Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, 2014.
Studio prompt
How do creative sound practices and critical listening inform our future relations with environments, machines, and more-than-humans?
Studio description
Sound and listening have always been powerful mnemonic devices, of travelling back in time; think of the way in which a voice from the past, or music from your childhood triggers a flood of memories and recollections. Likewise, sounds can also trigger future echoes, opening speculative pathways to experiences, ideas, and possible worlds to come. Can we listen to the future? Or can we hear echoes of possible futures in the soundscapes, real or imagined, of the present?
In this studio, future-focused sound making will act as a structural base to mobilise and explore ecological frameworks and machine listening technologies. Through this eco-techno approach to sound and listening, we will explore how critical sonic practices help us understand our contemporary world in all its complexities, from the data-driven logics of AI and platform capitalism to questioning possible climate realities.
In this studio you will gain hands-on experience with audio recording processes and post-production audio techniques. We will work with a variety of plugins in a digital audio workstation (DAW) to develop a practical understanding of the fundamentals of sound design.
This studio begins with an introduction to sound, speech, listening and communication as sites of multi-species expression, sociality, and resistance; as forms of agency and identity, which will be investigated through producing your own sonic responses. In the second half of the semester, you will work collaboratively and individually to bring your own sound worlds to life with the purpose of imagining future eco-techno relations that organise the world differently.
Studio leader
Amias Hanley is an artist and educator working with sound and media to explore relations among bodies, technology, and contemporary ecologies. Engaging in speculative and site-responsive approaches, they make performances, installations and experimental compositions for multichannel environments, galleries, festivals, and screens.
Studio collaborator
Joel Stern is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Media and Communication at RMIT, and an Associate Editor at Disclaimer journal. With a background in experimental music, Stern’s work — spanning research, curation, and art — focuses on practices of sound and listening and how these shape our contemporary worlds. His current work focuses on ‘machine listening’ and the relationship between sound and the politics of automation and AI. From 2013-2022 he was the Artistic Director of sonic art organisation Liquid Architecture.
https://machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/
Immersive Sandbox
Exploring Extended Reality (XR) with Film and Video
| Monday | 12.2.104 | 1:30-4:30pm |
| Wednesday | 10.2.62 | 12:30-2:30pm |
They Live (d. John Carpenter), 1988, Alive Films.
“Spirit of immersion and curiosity and awe and participation is something which Timothy Treadwell and I have in common.” Werner Herzog (2016)
“We don’t turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality” Lisa Cron (2016)
Studio Prompt
How might Extended Reality (XR) production provide an educational foundation and orientation to the growing extended reality field and assist in inspiring a broad range of theories on immersive technology?
Studio Description
The future of storytelling is one of immersion. Extended reality, or XR, is a collective term that refers to immersive technologies, including virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. Immersive technology enables a user to experience “seeing and doing”. From touch systems to spatial computing apps, and brain-computer interfaces, immersive technology has developed exponentially and advances in extended reality have already changed the way we work, live and play; and this progressive field is just getting started. The blurring of barriers between innovative content and reality has become a layered yet cohesive creation. From the extensive history and prehistory to contemporary times; extended reality (XR) and its overlapping virtual, augmented and mixed reality domains appears to have reached critical mass.
This course will be a comprehensive orientation to this burgeoning field, delving into a wide range of theories, prehistories, and histories of immersive technology, while grounding students in an introduction to contemporary tools and techniques. In this studio, students will research, develop and produce film, video work and immersive art that explore the idea of Extended Reality through focusing on novel and immersive forms of cinematic experiences.
Students will create immersive film, video and audio work that explores extended reality. This will potentially include an exploration of MR, VR, AR and Extended Reality Applications such as UE MetaHuman Creator, 3D LiDAR scanner Polycam, Adobe Aero, ARvid, Goliath VR, SimLab, A-Frame, AR Synth, Infinite Drummer, projection mapping software, green screen chroma keying as well as traditional filmmaking & foley techniques. The class will be an amalgamation of discourse, discussion, and practical experimentation.
Studio Leader
Cat Lew is a Video Artist, Sound Designer, Audio Engineer and Educator. She has a diverse creative practice, having produced video art and sound design for Melbourne Fringe Festival, West Projection Festival, Incinerator Gallery, Mesma Studio, Cinema Viscera, City of Melbourne and City of Maribyrnong. She currently teaches digital media, film & sound editing and design at VU Polytechnic, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and RMIT.
Poetic Video
Listing the Everyday
| Wednesday | 10.2.62 | 2:30-4:30pm |
| Friday | 12.2.104 | 1:30-4:30pm |
“A list of ‘things that quicken the heart’. Not a bad criterion I realize when I’m filming.”
Voice-over in Sunless (Chris Marker, 1983)
Studio Prompt
How can the list create poetic video works?
Studio Description
We tend to make sense of ourselves in the world through story. We edit together events according to cause-and-effect logic leaving so much texture on the cutting room floor. Does this need to craft a story with a beginning, middle and end simplify the richness of our lives? Could what gets left on the cutting room floor capture poetry in the world? In Poetic Video you will create media experiences which capture the everyday and potentially unseeable qualities of our experiences in the world. You will experiment with how the practical, personal, poetic, gathering, explosive and infinite qualities of the list will provide a tool to capture such experiences.
Online lists go part way in capturing such experiences as we scroll through videos on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and YouTube. Social media composes our lives in shifting, never ending and accumulative lists. In Poetic Video we will explore this explosion of lists online as a prompt for video production, and see how this could come closer to capturing the reality of our lived experiences. Further, we will look at how lists have been used in experimental and documentary films to create lyrical works.
In this studio you will have fun exploring poetic video through readings, video sketches and a professionally produced piece. You will leave Poetic Video with the conceptual and technical skills necessary to make new media, documentary and experimental video.
Studio Leader
Dr. Hannah Brasier is a research-practitioner interested in how attuned noticing can be used to engage with the world ecologically. Her experimental interactive documentary films combine the everyday, travel, landscape and environment to create ecologically conscious media. Hannah teaches conceptual studios and cinema studies in the school of Media & Communication at RMIT, and has been doing so for the past seven years.
The Festival Experience
Conceiving and mounting a film festival
| Wednesday | 10.2.62 | 4:30-6:30pm |
| Friday | 10.2.62 | 9:30am-12:30pm |
Cerise Howard introducing Ecstasy (dir. Gustav Machatý, 1933) at the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia, Melbourne Town Hall, 2018. Photo: Peter Bratuskins
“Listen, anybody who has a film festival has the right to show what they want.”
– Abel Ferrara
Studio Prompt
To what ends do we launch and sustain film festivals, with what means, and driven by what motivations?
Studio Description
This studio will steep students in all that constitutes film festival culture. Students will work collaboratively to stage a film festival in miniature. 2019’s studio spawned the Melbourne International Youth Film Festival, 2020’s the New Normal International Film Festival, 2021’s the Melbourne Overlooked Film Festival, while last year’s incubated the Séance International Film Festival. The middle two were held wholly online. What manner of festival will this year’s class spawn?
The hows, whys and for whoms of festivals will be extensively probed, from the festivals of the international A-list circuit to boutique local offerings, whether site-specific, online or onsite-online hybrids.
To what extent are international, national or regional film festivals exercises in soft diplomacy, or even propaganda? Do they strive to serve audiences both diasporic and cinephilic? Or are they driven by the imperatives of the marketplace? What about festivals nominally pitched at other communities, e.g., minoritarian identities?
This studio will explore how festival programming can differ from, or intersect with, that of commercial exhibitors, repertory cinemas and film societies, and will consider the ethical and practical considerations when determining what gets programmed. And whether staff even get paid! Branding, promotion, partnerships, contra deals… Guests, awards, jurors… Q&As, panels, workshops, conferences, emerging screen media platforms…
A festival of any proportions is a consuming undertaking. This studio will prime students for a film festive future. Participants will be assisted to forge industry networks and will blog about their experiences as an audience member, and as a producer, of film festival experiences.
Studio Leader
Cerise Howard is a widely published New Zealand-born critic and co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque who co-founded the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia and was its Artistic Director from 2013-2018. An oft called-upon commentator on intersections of screen media, gender, sexuality and other matters, she is a regular broadcaster on 3RRR and has been a member of the International Jury Board of the East-West: Golden Arch Awards, celebrating Eurasian cinema, for its three editions to date.
Away from film, she plays bass for Queen Kong and The HOMOsapiens, a Melbourne-based punk, performance art, queer rock band.
The Art of the Microbudget (ONLINE-ONLY)
| Monday | Online | 1:30-4:30pm |
| Thursday | Online | 2:30-4:30pm |
‘I think we can find solutions. And that limitation, that solution, is actually going to define us as a filmmaker, to allow us to find creative solutions that are going to be essential in forming our voice.’
– Chloe Zhao, Academy-Award Winning Director, ‘Nomadland’, ‘The Rider’ (source)
Studio Prompt
How can the limitations of microbudget filmmaking, enhance the creativity of a film outcome? How can we employ style, genre, and character to successfully produce a short film that costs next to nothing?
Studio Description
Microbudget filmmaking has become more feasible and achievable with the advent of technology, meaning filmmakers can take creativity into their own hands through inventive storytelling that utilises the parameters of a small budget to great outcomes.
Films like Chloe Zhao’s ‘The Rider’, Rodrigo Cortés’ ‘Buried’, Oren Peli’s ‘Paranormal Activity’, Gustav Möller’s ‘The Guilty’, and Aneesh Chaganty’s ‘Searching’ all consider use of limited cast, locations, and filming style to produce a successful and engaging film, and we’re going to investigate how they do it. From pre-production, through to post-production.
In a process of reverse engineering, once we better understand the production process and parameters for a microbudget film, you’ll then write, direct and edit your very own microbudget short film – using the knowledge you’ve acquired to empower you to take your filmmaking into your own hands without having it cost the earth!
The aim is that students leave this studio empowered with the knowledge of the production process to make smart creative choices for their early career film projects that can still be creatively bold whilst remaining on a realistic budget.
Studio leader
Tim Marshall is an award-winning filmmaker from Brisbane, Queensland. In 2013, his short film Gorilla won the Iris Prize in the UK, awarding him £25K for his next short. The outcome of this, Followers, screened at Sundance Film, SXSW, and MIFF in 2015 and is a proof of concept for his upcoming feature film Saviour.
At the start of 2021, Tim shot his first feature film as writer/director, queer horror Closing Night. The film stars award-winning queer actor Daniel Monks, with executive producers Dan Lake and Kurt Royan from Orange Entertainment Co. The film will be released in 2022.
In 2017, he won the WeScreeplay TV Pilot Script contest judged by Comedy Central, and placed as a semi-finalist in the Academy Nicholl Fellowship in 2014. As a screenwriter, Tim has learned from the very best – having developed his scripts with the assistance of script consultants including Meg LeFauve (writer, Inside Out), Andrew Ellard (writer, IT Crowd, Red Dwarf), Lynne Vincent McCarthy (script editor, The Babadook, The Nightingale), Ruth Atkinson (Sundance Screenwriting Lab script consultant), and Guinevere Turner (writer, American Psycho).