Untold Stories – Assignment 3

Blog Posts:

PROPOSAL

You will design and deliver a proposal outlining your major project. Your proposal should demonstrate:

a clear and distinctive concept/idea/story

Our project will be a history of the Westgate bridge. Similar to the values of the living museum of the west, our group wants to uncover stories and history surrounding the Westgate bridge and preserve them. Through interviews we’ve done with the public, it has come to light that not that many people know about the bridge’s history and it’s story.

research into participants, locations and other material

Through looking through the archives at the museum we’ve come across other documentaries on the bridge which look heavily into the collapse in 1970. These documentaries have information about the people interviewed who we would be able to get in contact with. One documentary filmmaker included in the museum is Donna Jackson. She has worked with the museum as well which means getting in contact with her will be quite easy. Being able to contact her would also help us find other leads for potential interviewees.

evidence of research into other projects that have inspired you and/or theory

Through the videos we’ve already made we discuss information uncovered by the museum and Donna Jackson. Especially in the documentary interviews we found we got an understanding of first-hand experiences of some of the workers during the collapse of the bridge.

production schedule with timeline

Working title:

Westgate

Form and medium:

Our major project will be a series of chaptered videos. This will be done using an interactive platform like verse where each video can be selected according to the viewer’s preference. This will be available online as well as at the living museum of the west. We aim for each video to be three to five minutes in length.

Short synopsis:

Our project will be a video collection which chronicles the history of the Westgate bridge, from before its creation to what it is today and how it has shaped Melbourne and affected the construction industry.

Longer synopsis:

Bridge Overview

This will involve a general, welcoming introduction to give the audience a sense of where we are in relation to Melbourne’s history and the importance of the structure in today’s society. This will act as a bit of a short timeline to bring the audience up to speed and allow them to gain the necessary knowledge to understand where we are up to in our chapters so they can easily follow along and enjoy the pieces we create.

Life before the bridge

This video will consider the political agenda of the time and setting up our film in a formal, structured manner would depict a fair recount of the time period before the bridge was built. We will look at why the need for a bridge existed at all and other possible options that were available. We will look at how life existed without the bridge, how people got on with their lives and why the bridge took so long to initially get permission to build. Then, how and why people were involved with its construction and possibly the indigenous music they listened to during their breaks.

Collapse/Aftermath

This section will use a lot of archival footage and material we have already dealt with. We will look at workers who were involved with the bridge at the time and what happened to make the bridge physically fall. We will rework a lot of our footage we already gathered and made videos of. This will hopefully be a poetic / artistic depiction as we need to sensitively handle such dire circumstances and show some variation in our videos.

Completion

This chapter would involve an interview with Danny who worked on the bridge after the collapse and we will focus on how it was built to be secure and sturdy. We can look at the important aspects of the bridge that make in successful in today’s society and how they went about dealing with the pressure to build such an important structure.

The bridge today

In this chapter we aim to cover and follow the real life use of the bridge in today’s society. By incorporating written texts and contributions from the community, we can showcase a plethora of people’s experiences and general thoughts on the iconic structure. Using modern archival footage from packages made by news companies focussing on the unsturdy structure as it stands, what the bridge looks like with two Australian flags, the continued use of cars driving along it, people’s lives who evolve alongside the bridge and those who work on it or see it often by fishing or walking underneath it. With Donna’s help, we can look at the way we see the bridge and how the memory of the collapse is being kept alive by the play production and the union’s involvement.

What is your individual role or component of this project?

Visualisation:

We will produce a website that guides the audience through a video timeline. These videos will consist of talking head interviews, audio recordings coupled with mise-en-scene shots and archival material. We will be focusing on video production so essential skills will be production and post-production knowledge will be needed. We will use WordPress to create the website so an existing knowledge of this is needed.

Rationale:

The premise is to create a video timeline of the bridge through chapters due to the lack of knowledge about the bridge’s history. We will look into experiences that cover pre & post collapse and also contemporary, personal accounts of audience’s experiences of the westgate bridge.

Archival Material:

We will be using archival photographs from the museum and may reference other resources found. We will be focusing on creating most of the content for our production which will create a resource for the museum, which can be explored though the Living Museum of the West’s website.

Main participants:

Our main focus being the bridge as a whole means our participants will come from many areas of the bridge and its story. We’ve contacted Danny Gardiner who’s involved in the westgate memorial committee. He and Tom Watson had worked on the bridge, Tom working on the bridge during the collapse and Danny after it. Being so heavily involved in the bridge during it’s disaster period will help give us a good insight into that part of the bridges timeline and a first hand experience of these events. Enza Gandolfo has written a book on the Westgate titled The Bridge about the impact the collapse had made on the city and people/families who were involved in the collapse of the bridge in a really moving book. Donna Jackson, is someone we’ve been really interested in talking to since looking at the work she’s done at the museum and her research. The fact that she’s been involved in researching this topic for so long means her knowledge of the bridge and its story is quite in depth and we think this makes her an important character to telling the story of the bridge. We also thought talking to “Local Fisherman” or people who work on the river would help give us an idea of what the bridge means to them today and how it’s past events have sculpted their opinion of the bridge and its impact to the west and melbourne as a whole.

Setting:

The Living Museum of the West, West Gate Bridge, Under the Westgate bridge, homes/living rooms

Research video/photos/audio:

Interview test shots: