Week 6.2 – Documentary Concept

With Week 7 drawing closer we spent this studio refining our pitch and smoothing out the last few details. It took us a fair few brainstorming sessions to properly dissect our topic and determine how it relates to ‘neighbourhood’, ‘memory’, ‘identity’ and ‘change’. Our analysis of skating culture eventually boiled down to this: it is inherently connected to the concept of neighbourhood as the urban landscape is used functionally by skaters to enact their activities, while memory and identity play equally important parts. Skating is the kind of hobby that many would have first attempted at a young age and grew up with over time, and so it becomes embedded in their identity. Many would have strong memorial connections to the practice, not just with the hobby itself, but with the community and culture they became familiar and comfortable with. As we have explored, comfort and familiarity are some of the primary associations with feelings of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’. The ‘change’ that our film revolves around is both physical and metaphorical. We discovered that the City of Melbourne had deliberately redeveloped parts of the city to make the surfaces un-skateable, and members of the council had publicly scorned skaters by likening them to ‘little bogans’. However recently, they reneged on this decision by resurfacing all the areas to make them ‘skateable’ once again, a move that reflects a broader social change in the perception of skaters and skate culture. Skate culture has often been aligned with ‘gang culture’ and delinquency, though this is far from the truth. Our film aims to explore skate culture from a much more realistic perspective, and provide insight into how skating can positively benefit those who participate.