This week I went and visited the Zanny Begg exhibition at ACMI called The Beehive. It was quite a cool experience! There was a dark room set up in ACMI with some seats and bean bag chairs and a big screen showing the 33 minute documentary film by Begg, about the unsolved murder of Sydney anti-development campaigner Juanita Nielsen. The film was made up of lots of different small films and was randomly assembled a different way each time it was shown, which I thought was a really interesting way to present the film. Some of the smaller films were reenactments, some were more poetic experimental and some were documentary. My favourite was a kind of poetic piece. It was a black background with different bees and flowers that popped up to the time of the musical track that was behind it. I didn’t end up seeing the whole documentary as ACMI closed an hour early that day for some reason, so they kicked us all out! But what I did see I did very much enjoy!

This design was represented in parts of the actual exhibition, for example on the seats and walls. But was also used as a backdrop for part of the film, which made you feel more connected to the documentary piece.

This week I also went and visited the MOMA exhibition at NGV. There was quite a few media pieces and films in the exhibition too. My favourite was a film that was based around a computers home screen and opening videos. They would overlap, go in between screens and go into full screen, et cetera. I thought it was a really interesting way to present the footage. It’s difficult to explain and I can’t remember the artists name, sorry!

This week on Friday we went to The Living Museum of the West. It was nice going for a walk around the grounds of the museum, I particularly liked the mosaics and the Roman poles. Our group then discussed ideas for the project. We took a while to get our ideas down, it was mostly hard because our whole group wasn’t there because Darcie had to leave to get to class at uni. Georgia and I looked through interviews that were digitised on the computer and tried to create a story around that. Our original idea was to find an interview with a Vietnamese immigrant and then film cutaways at the Footscray Market. But once we had found interviews with Vietnamese immigrants, we realised that all the interviews with the Vietnamese immigrants were in Vietnamese, which was a hurdle we most definitely did not expect. 

For our voice over piece we found a transcript of an interview with an Italian womens group in Werribee. The transcript was written more in the form of an informational piece rather than an interview. The women were hesitant to be interviewed and taped by themselves, so it written down in notes more generally. Eventually we got our ideas down and sent it to Darcie, at about 1:30!