This Thursday we embarked on our search for the communities of the West. This experience was something completely new for me. We grabbed two cameras, hopped into Lindsay’s car, drove to the Circle and asked people 3 simple questions:

1. Where are you from?
2. How do you feel about Altona?
3. Where do you think people go to feel close to the community?

This went much better than I expected. When we arrived at the Circle and started testing the cameras, someone just came to us asking what we were doing and then led us straight into a grocery store to talk to people they knew and film around. I didn’t expect such reception at all! I thought we would have to chase after people and convince them to talk to us. Instead, we got an interview within 2 minutes of our arrival. I filmed a little bit on my phone just to remember the scenery:

We got 3 or 4 vox pops that day, I can’t remember the exact number. It felt wildly different to any other project I’ve ever done before. And I loved it! I was learning and exploring something completely unknown to me and documenting it at the same time. I am used to having every little detail planned and under control. If I am at the point of a production where I take out a camera, I know for sure there is nothing new about the matter that could surprise me. But not this time. It was a pure experiment, pure exploration. It was so weird for me to simply give in and go with the flow. Surprisingly, it didn’t feel like just an assignment anymore, I felt like I was really learning something. At this point, I was glad things didn’t work out with the community centre. Allow me to get a little personal- I am always tense and worried about a thousand things at once. I freak out when I’m not in control and when I don’t have a revised script and a precise plan. And this time I found myself in a situation where I had no choice but to relax and take things as they come. I feel like this experience has led me to really broaden my understanding of how a video should be produced. I got to experience a whole new approach to creating a documentary and I learnt to let go too. I feel like this experience is really meaningful and will affect my further work a lot.

Going back to the project, I really liked the new direction we are taking. It might not be very well made technically, we’ll definitely have bad lighting and background noise, but I like what we have now much much more than a stiff interview in a dusty office. It feels honest and it feels real. We are putting our experience and ourselves out there, we are inviting the audience to share our adventure and our search for the communities. This is a real open space documentary, there is nothing conventional about it. We experiment and we document more than just a chosen topic- we document the whole process. And I like it.

This reminded me of a famous documentary Super Size Me. This film had a very low budget and the quality of the video is questionable at best, but it became one of the most influential documentaries nonetheless. The main character pretty much documents his journey on a crappy camera, simply filming what was going on. The vox pops and interviews in this film are a lot like ours too. They are not professionally set up interviews with impeccable sound and image, but rather rough conversations filmed on the spot. It’s calming for me to know that films like that can still be successful and get recognition and that there is a famous documentary that we can compare our project with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1NnrXknRNg

I am still not sure where exactly we are going or what our final cut will look like. I have to admit, it drives me crazy not have every little detail planned and storyboarded, but it’s a great opportunity for me to loosen up a little and open myself up for new experiences. Wherever we end up with this documentary, I know that I will learn way more from it than I could from another neatly planed traditional film.