I’m happy that we’re finished, but most importantly, I am proud of what we managed to achieve! From the beginning we as a group bounced off quite a few ambitious ideas and interesting stories that it seemed we were all on the same page in that we wanted to create our short documentary at a high standard to submit to any film festivals in the future.

Therefore when it came to pitching for the LGBTI Dance Ball, we were gutted to know hear that if we were to pursue this story then we would have to only submit the final film for academic purposes. As we contacted all of our potential interviewees that were based in Melbourne, we found ourselves at square one again and had to accept the fact that we were going to have outsource to interviewees interstate.

To be honest, this was one of my favourite group projects I’ve ever worked. Every single one of us contributed at every step of the way from pre-production with research, contributing to the proposal and compiling appropriate questions; the production stage when it came to participating during the interview and ensuring that everything was going smoothly; and the post-production phase where everyone had their honest and best input to what is usually the most stressful and the most time consuming of the entire process.

The nature of most group projects is that some would do more than others, but most importantly, everyone was honest with what they considered to be their strengths and weakness that many of us actually challenged ourselves; whether it was building a rapport with an interviewee or enhancing their skills with Premiere Pro. Another reason why everything pulled together in the end, was how everyone was so accommodating and would sacrifice their time and other assignments to ensure that everything is going to plan – that’s when you know that you’re working with people who genuinely care on the same level as you do.

Yes, it was a journey and a lot of obstacles to overcome but I guess that’s of the fun of filmmaking. In that sometimes the obstacles become your biggest learning curves and achievements to grow in our media practice.

(Thank you Rohan!!)

IMPERFECT ILLUSION

LOGLINE
Claire Ashman reflects on the time in life when she was brainwashed and lived most of her life trapped in two ultra-religious, Doomsday cults.

SYNOPSIS
Claire Ashman didn’t own a pair of jeans, wear a bikini or get her ears pierced until she was 38. Spending
most of her life born, raised and married in a Doomsday cult. As a child, Claire was brainwashed and
lived most of her life trapped in two separate ultra-religious, Doomsday cults. Raised in an ultra religious
Catholic sect based in Melbourne, at age 18 Claire married a 31-year-old man and moved to Nowra,
NSW, to form part of the Order of St Charbel cult run by William “Little Pebble” Kamm. Through the use of digital mixed media, this short documentary explores Claire’s experience and struggles both within and her journey out of a religious Doomsday cult.

CREDITS

Directors
Alana Meehan
Katrina Salvador
Laura Apelt
Oscar Peterson
Tristan Winter

Producers
Alana Meehan
Katrina Salvador
Laura Apelt
Oscar Peterson
Tristan Winter

Editors
Alana Meehan
Katrina Salvador
Laura Apelt
Oscar Peterson
Tristan Winter

Photos Courtesy of
Claire Ashman

Videos Courtesy of
Archive.org
‘Jeans Historian’
‘Jesus Man’
Brenda Lee
‘Not Like Calvin’
‘Bass Angler’
Malcolm Broussard

We adhered to our Ethics Charter, but it was difficult to not include Mary and Carli into the final edit especially when we’ve managed to condense and edit Carli’s story into a particular sequence.

Firstly, we had a few tech issues with the audio of the screen recordings (Skype connections), and the camera didn’t have enough storage to capture the entire 2 hours of both interviews. Secondly, hearing Mary’s story was so gut-wrenching and was something we attempted to edit down but there were times where it felt raw and wouldn’t do her any justice if we were to incorporated both her expertise as a psychologist and her personal experience within 2 different stories. If anything, she deserves to have her own separate short documentary.

Likewise, Carli’s recount of her experience had a completely different tone to Claire’s that she deserves to have her own short documentary. As we continued further into editing her sequence, the Skype connection during the interview distorted the audio and ultimately was of a much lower quality than Claire’s interview. It was far too much work for the remaining time we had in order to level the audio tracks and sync the audio with the footage, while also trying to figure out the appropriate order to weave their interviews into one concise piece.

Hopefully, one day we will have the opportunity to re-interview Carli and Mary as they all have the same intention of raising awareness about the real life experiences and the epidemic of cults in Australia.

Must do’s before Week 12!

• Sync up the audio of the screen recording, the H4n microphone and DSLR audio to prevent any more echoes from happening.
• Ensure that we make a copy of all the found footage and audio links we’ve used and double check everything is royalty free so we don’t get sued (pls).
• If Premiere Pro file is not opening, reopen the file through the auto-save folder (and pray that most of it actually saved)
• Create the appropriate audio fades to create more breaths and in this case, ensure that audio levels are swell.
• Book, Book, Book an edit suite room ahead of time! Just so you don’t get kicked out constantly.
• Always save everything onto the media server and another drive. If you can, save another copy of the edit with an older or newer version of Premiere Pro (Goddamn updates!!!!)
• Try and be calm and patient when editing out the unnecessary ums and ahs out of the interviews.
• Label the edits the most appropriate name for the next person to continue editing.
• (Have a substantial amount of coffee)
• Cut out any repeated information.
• Ensure that the structure is concise before the consultation session with Rohan.
• Double check with him if we’re allowed to use certain footage that would be relevant and appropriate as b-roll footage.

One documentary I came across the other week and hooked me from the start was Stevan Riley’s Listen to me Marlon (2015). This 103 min documentary is packed with reenactments, behind the scenes to his films and theatre productions, archival footage of his private life and snippets of audio from some his fellow co-stars.

However, what separates this film from any other biographies based on him, is that Riley utilises decades worth of Brando’s personal voice recordings, confessionals and self-hypnosis to narrate the events that happened throughout his life. Riley aided this with a digitalised scanning of Brando’s head as a nod to Brando’s hypothesis decades ago that computers were going to replace actors in the future. Although it raises the film’s authority as a real and raw account of Brando’s life, would Brando himself approve of the general public to hear these personal and sacred voice diary entries? Would the people he mentions and involved in these recordings be affected in terms of their reputation and their relationships with other people?

Much like Grizzly Man, Brando’s voice recordings are relevant in understanding a man that is often misunderstood under the overbearing spotlight. A son who dedicated a majority of his life trying to be completely different from his estranged father and mother, an accomplished actor who was notoriously difficult to work with, a celebrity who hated the fame and celebrity life, a campaigner for civil rights and a father who is scarred by the suicide of his daughter and imprisonment of his son.

Silence followed by a quiet “wow” was the first response we received from the class on our first cut of Imperfect Illusion. The fresh eyes and feedback from Rohan, Elise and the class helped us immensely in terms of structure and other minor details. The following was suggested:

• The hook really hooked them all and the first half overall was quite succinct. The second half is something that needs to concentrated on within this week.
• The syncing of the audio and consistency is number one priority.
• Claire seems to be more engaging in her rhetoric than Carli is.
• The details of how long they’ve been in a cult for must be somewhere at the start and not towards the end.
• You must revisit the hook from the start.
• More breaths must be incorporated so that the viewer has enough time to process the information.

I hadn’t mention it before, but we decided to narrow down the short doco between Claire and Carli in order to do justice to Mary’s story. I’ll reflect on this decision on my blog post next week. I feel that we are on track in terms of the focus on Claire and Carli reflecting on their respective cult experiences and the aftermath rather than a story about what cults are like in a general sense. We want to make it as real and human as possible to raise these issues that mainstream media often fails to portray.

This week I decided to destress myself by listening to Nina Simone, and found myself watching Liz Garbus’ 2015 documentary film What Happened, Nina Simone? (2015) after a quick search on Netflix. Throughout the 1hr 42min film, I was learning more and more about a talented woman who was misunderstood her entire life. A classical musical trained woman who played jazz to make a living dreamed to play classical music at Carnegie Hall but instead for forced to play jazz.

Liz successfully portrays a real and raw biography on Nina. She was a woman beyond her time and pioneered the path for women to rise against all the bullshit in the world and revolutionised music and artistry throughout the 20th century. However, through the interviews of all the people who knew her best from her daughter, her former and abusive lover (footage from an interview in the past) and to her lifelong guitarist and friend, Nina was deeply lonely and broken inside. The pain is ever so prominent in her music and watching her performances throughout the documentary breaks your heart a little that such pain can bring out such beauty on stage.

This documentary reflects the trust that Nina’s daughter, Lisa has with Liz on documenting such an influential person to the big screen. Would highly recommend!

The most concerning thing for me was to sacrifice the HD aesthetic quality that we would want to produce from a typical one-on-one interview. However, the various Skype interviews diminish that expectation already. At this stage we’ve interviewed Mary, Carli and Claire at different times and with different people interviewing each interviewee.

Rohan encouraged us to embrace this unconventional and particular aesthetic to our advantage by using old found footage, extreme close-ups of the subjects faces throughout the interview and utilise distorted, old-school analogue footage to suggest as if the viewer is being hypnotised and “brainwashed” themselves.

At this stage, I’m in the middle of dissecting through Claire’s 1 hour long interview into an ideal time frame that will accommodate Carli and Mary’s story. Thankfully, Rohan has given us the nod and green light to extend beyond the 5 minute time frame to bring all their stories to justice and to ensure that it was to be concise and understandable throughout the entire short doco. It’s already week 9, but we’re definitely making progress!

After watching Laura and Rohan fan-girl over the latest most raved about the Netflix short documentary series Wild, Wild Country (2018), I decided to check it out for myself. It still baffles me that what was once a small cult that was birthed in a small town in India suddenly moved hundreds of its followers to a small country-town in Wasco County, Oregon USA. I must admit the 1 hour or so episodes take a lot of out of you and attempting to binge-watching this series is not encouraged – but props to you if do and can handle it well! The documentary follows the rift between the Wasco County locals and the Rajneeshpuram community through the use of interviews from both parties (beautifully composed), archival footage and re-enactments (that were – once again – beautifully shot) of Wasco County.

Other than being quite aesthetically pleasing and comforting, the structure itself blurs the line between good and evil. What we assume would be presented as the “evil” is the Rajneeshpuram followers, however it somehow presented them as victims or “broken souls” and found their way of being happy. Probably except for Sheela who was clearly consumed by her own ambition and power beyond the religious group but also subtly presented as a victim of Osho’s manipulation.

The locals seemed to be the victims of this idea of the American dream and the large group that had the absolute potential to strip that away from them. At first, they accepted the Rajneeshpuram community into their own, but only realised that their jobs and homes were ultimately going to be abolished if they didn’t resist Sheela’s “cunning ways”.

I’m still in the middle of the 3rd episode but it just feels so surreal that this all unfolded about 30 years ago, the interviewees always have something interesting to share and appear at the most appropriate of times and the found footage just seem so confronting and overwhelming at times that I just sit there and wonder how far I can go with watching this entire series. It’s like I’m between this fine line of curiosity and nope, that’s enough Netflix for the day. At this stage I’m on the curiosity side, but will take about an episode a day or maybe a week to be safe.  

Speaking of incorporating yourself into your own documentary, Werner Herzog is one of the view that know how to do so successfully. In Grizzly Man (2005) he doesn’t act condescending or try to conceal any kind of truth, but instead curbs our curiosity through his and humanises Timothy Treadwell and the ones who are close to him.

This particular scene in the film presents 2 different tones within the film; factual and emotional. The coroner staring at the barrel of the camera made the scene quite scripted while detailing Timothy and Amie’s death and the jump cuts enhances the impact of the death through his description.

Timothy’s close friend Jewel Palovak appears after the coroner and suddenly the pace and tone changes. As Herzog listens to the audio of Timothy and Amie, the camera lingers onto Jewel’s traumatised face as Herzog appears to be overwhelmed and extremely uncomfortable while listening to them. We as the viewer are emotionally driven and realise that the tragedy of it all is that Timothy was murdered by the ones who he tried to save and love the most.    

Read more about Grizzly Man on my previous blog post.