Cel, Jess, Sarah & Leah

• Australia’s First Ecomuseum
• The Living Museum
• A Museum for the West

All members worked on 

 Your History Mate

The Life of the Living Museum of the West

The heart of culture in the West since 1984

The museum in the West

The museum you should know about

All members worked on

Buried behind the trees lining the Maribyrnong river, The Living Museum of the West thrives. This quaint community hub plays host to the history and untold stories of Melbourne’s western suburbs. Every nook and cranny of the museum is filled with images and artifacts from the area. Yet, the majority of the community is oblivious to its existence. This piece explores how this place and it’s dedicated volunteers have evolved along with the community.

Cel

Leah

We want to target people who live in the west or potential local sponsors and encourage them to visit and invest in the museum. We’ll be showing how the Living Museum works and what it does for the community members.

Older residents who have a vested interest in the areas history or those who want to learn about their heritage would find this documentary pleasing. 

There is another audience we want to target a niche audience member may be a younger generation of males and females aged 20-30 who are beginning to populate the area due to the building development. They may have a vested interest in learning about the Museum or contributing materials about things that are happening now. 

Cel

• Australia’s first ecomuseum
• Community museum, operating in the western region of Melbourne in the state of Victoria, Australia
• Ecomuseum: focused on the identity of a place, largely centred on participation and the extended development of the community. There are currently about 300 operating ecomuseums in the world. 
• Set up in 1984 to address what was seen then as a disadvantaged region due to its terrain and industrialisation
• Has explored oral history, women’s contribution to region history & Aboriginal Heritage

• Peter Haffenden: born in Footscray, once worked at the Angliss meat works, drove taxis, graduated in economics at the University of Melbourne and worked for the Age and the ABC as a journalist. Been with the Living Museum since 1984. 
• Kerrie has a background in art. She was a graduate trainee through a scheme organised by “life be in it” for unemployed people with tertiary qualifications. 
• The Park’s location is of especial significance sitting on the banks of the Maribyrnong River – a point of early European occupation 
• Largest and earliest meat canneries were based nearby
• Bluestone buildings – physical, historical and visual context
• Initial idea came from several directions and evolved from the political and economic context of the early 1980s
• Locals: interested in creating a museum about the Maribyrnong River Valley, including industrial sites and their significance, as well as valley’s portrayal of the different stages of Aboriginal and European occupation
• The ecomuseum is simply where a slice of the real world becomes a ‘museum’. An existing industrial community, for example, that is interpreted in a museum context. 
• “From the political side came concern for raising what was perceived as a negative profile for Melbourne’s western suburbs which had been dubbed ‘the deprived west’ in the early seventies.”
• “People are the grist of this Museum. It is about people in Melbourne’s Western Region. Who they are, what they are part of, what they have contributed and what they can contribute. It is a community museum that meets the community on as many levels as possible and is defined very much by the people in the community and how they use the museum.”
• “Much of the multi-cultural richness and the richness of industrial working people’s culture was in a sense invisible, undocumented and undervalued. There was a need for documentation and presentation of people’s stories before it was too late.”
• Emphasis on oral history and visual emphasis (thus the tape recordings)
• Areas seen as under-represented and under-valued were investigated pointedly 
• “As much as we needed the money to keep the Museum going, would consultancy work deflect us from our aims and objectives as a museum? If you can earn money when does the earning of money interfere with what you are there to do. This can also be true of pursuing grant money of course.”
• Open space working desks encourages open dialogue between staff
• “To try and put it simply the models that were available carried the underlying assumption of a profit motive as a driving force and purpose of business. The focus of non profit organisations is to use money to fund programs. The classic focus of business is to use programs to produce money. This simple difference changed the whole approach to a business plan.”
• 
• “In many ways the Museum of today is dramatically different to the Museum which stumbled naively into the western suburbs with tape recorders in hand ten years earlier. Yet it has held steadily to its first aims and objectives, maintaining links with the community, always involving the people of the region in interpreting their own heritage, constantly keeping alive the guiding principle that it’s your history mate.”

Leah

Our project is a documentary film exploring the history of the museum as well as exploring the personality and heart behind the museum. It will include interviews with staff members, visiting their work spaces and exploring their day to day activities,  as well as archival material and footage sourced from inside the museum. It would be around 8-10 mins, as we want to be extensive with the Museum History yet condense it simultaneously to be more digestible. We took it as a formal introduction film of the Museum so it may be lengthy. As for our interview, we will interview about how the museum was built, what it was built for and what it can do, and what impact it has on the outside world. Many of our interviews with museum staff are about why they come to work in this museum, what their daily work is like, and how they’ve gained experience from this museum. There would be 3 or 4 interviews in our film that about we interviewing the staff at Museum. At week 5 we had already interviewed one staff member and from this had an idea of the lighting and colour of our project and how we wanted to structure, style and express our project – since Peter is a veteran of the Museum we had a better idea of the personality and throughout the process picked up on points we wanted to emphasise and explore. In terms of sound design and ambience we are looking for quite a naturalistic and minimal soundscape – using the sounds of the West and the sounds of the Museum together as our soundtrack. We may also explore overlapping different staff members’ VOX pops as our introductory sound. While we will be filming the Museum space and staff we will also be filming the surrounding environment – the gardens, the bluestone building next door, and the landscapes around the river that are understood as part of the museum. 

Jess, Leah + Sarah

Elements used from the museum will include archival material, most notably the ‘Your History Mate’ book for research and reference (which can also prompt interview questions), and photos in the museum’s collection that document and follow its journey from the conception of Australia’s first ecomuseum up until recent times. We will record interviews and b-roll around the museum ourselves and it will be focussed on three to four staff members as they go about their day at the museum as well as answer some thought provoking questions about their experiences and why this space is so important to them. The elements used from the museum will be interwoven in the interview, for example we may show staff members some older photographs of the museum and ask them if any of the photos prompt significant or meaningful memories. We will take the audience around the Museum and find out what has changed during the years after it has been built, including footage which will be compared with the older archives. 

Jess

Projector (sourced by Leah) inside an enclosed dark space with seating, so that it is more of an immersive experience- need to consult with staff for location that would be suitable. Projector will need to be plugged in to a power source and have a flat wall to project the image onto. Will source dark curtains (from an op-shop most likely) to hang up to create an enclosed space and will use the red couch and pillows to put inside for seating. 

Jess

Never Ending Man 2016, streaming video, GKIDS Films, Japan, viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.docplay.com/shows/never-ending-man-hayao-miyazaki>.	Never Ending Man 2016, streaming video, GKIDS Films, Japan, viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.docplay.com/shows/never-ending-man-hayao-miyazaki>.
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness 2013, streaming video, GKIDS Films, Japan, viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.docplay.com/shows/studio-ghibli—the-kingdom-of-dreams-and-madness>.	BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content, Youtube, 24 April, Max Joseph, viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIW5jBrrsS0>.
BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content, Youtube, 24 April, Max Joseph, viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIW5jBrrsS0>.	Behind the scenes in the Museum’s archive | Curator’s Corner Season 3 Episode 2, Youtube, 4 February, The British Museum, London,  viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHptcFmn6bg>.
Behind the scenes in the Museum’s archive | Curator’s Corner Season 3 Episode 2, Youtube, 4 February, The British Museum, London,  viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHptcFmn6bg>.	Behind the scenes in the Museum’s archive | Curator’s Corner Season 3 Episode 2, Youtube, 4 February, The British Museum, London,  viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHptcFmn6bg>.
Archiving in a born digital era (Short Documentary), Youtube, 20 October, Josh Sierra, Cardiff, viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thpW-95m10w>.	Archiving in a born digital era (Short Documentary), Youtube, 20 October, Josh Sierra, Cardiff, viewed 15 August 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thpW-95m10w>.

All members contributed

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHptcFmn6bg 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thpW-95m10w 

History Mate Book

https://www.livingmuseum.org.au/publications/ecomuseum_studies.html 

 A script for each component (using the template provided)

We anticipate the documentary will have a running time of eight to ten minutes. For the purposes of this proposal we have developed a one minute script which fits in with the overall style and concept of the piece. 

Cel + Jess

Week 5: Tuesday: Start interviewing and talking with staff about ideas and discussing amongst ourselves what the plan is for the future of the project.

Week 5: Thursday: Finalise Assignment 

Week 6: Tuesday: Begin planning for next part of assignment

Week 6: Thursday: Assignment ready for submission; Group meeting to plan and develop aims, read through ‘Your History Mate’

Week 7: Bring camera to museum and start interviews plus b-roll

Week 7: Plan for next week (reserve camera)

Week 8: Continue Interviews and b-roll

Week 8: Finalise assignment 3

Week 9: Assignment #3 due + visit to the museum

Week 9: Have a look at all the videos we have and organise in order

Week 10: Editing videos together

Week 10: Searching for Bgm for the film, continue editing

Week 11: Organizing photos or images we have, continue editing 

Week 11: Rendering the video and exporting it 

Week 12: Finalise assignment 4

Week 12: Submit Assignment #4

Week 13: Have a conversation about what we’ve made and what we achieved from this Film making progress- further planning for the exhibition.

Week 13: Exhibition 

Jess + Sarah