This week we presented our proposal to the class, Kerrie and Matthew from the museum. I am happy with the feedback we got from them and am happy to take the suggestions we got. One of the suggestions we had was to possibly include more females in our project when possible. While researching, we found out that at the HMAS Castlemaine highly encourages women to volunteer and join the ranks. So we have asked, while trying to contact the volunteers, if we are able to interview a mix of female and male volunteers while interviewing.

In Fridays class we started to watch a short documentary called Somewhere Special by Darren Hercher. I found this really inspiring as I hadn’t ever seen a documentary like that. I also thought it was an awesome way to explore the world and go on adventures! I particularly liked at the beginning where he wrote down what he wanted to do on a piece of paper and then showed the camera instead of voiceover or text on the screen or anything like that. Then he got the first person that walked outside of the ‘Job Centre’ and asked them a place that is special to them. He also got this person to write down the place on another piece of paper. Which I thought was a cute way to mix it up, rather than editing text in in post production.

While watching the documentaries and clips that we did in class on Friday, our group realised how traditionally we planned our documentaries to be. So in class we discussed how we could change it up a bit. Our biggest decision was that we decided that our documentary about the Heavenly Queen Temple in Footscray would be more of a poetic piece than a traditional documentary form with talking heads and cutaways. We want to conduct an interview with one of the volunteers at the temple and ask them about the legend of the Heavenly Queen. Then film some beautiful cutaways of the temple. The temple is very extravagant and colourful inside, so I think that this would be a very beautiful video.

The reading this week also gave me some inspiration on Open Space Documentary. I think that the series of films called Precious Places seemed particularly interesting. I think that exploring the history of public places would be very interesting to watch.