School of Film and TV - Theses
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ItemCaptured(University of Melbourne, 2009)CAPTURED is a psychological drama about celebrated photographer, Mikey Hayes, whose son disappears under mysterious circumstances whilst in his care. In a desperate bid to find him, Mikey runs onto a road where he gets hit by a car. When he recovers in hospital, he has no memory of the accident, the disappearance or his own identity. As memory slowly returns to Mikey, a news story about a drowned boy reminds him that his son is missing and he notifies the police. The police locate Mikey's estranged wife, Vita, and from her learn of a conflicting scenario relating to Jake's disappearance. As new information comes to light, it becomes apparent that neither parent knows the full details of their son's predicament. Vita and Mikey are forced to acknowledge the pivotal role they played in his disappearance in order to discover what really happened to him.
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ItemExplorative sculpture as a creativity support tool for developing characters and stories for animation( 2017)This practice-led research examines the use of explorative sculpture as a creativity support tool for developing characters and stories for animated films and video games. The process of constructing three-dimensional representations to visualise and catalyse ideas, is practised in a range of domains, including architecture, fine art and industrial design. These physical representations are sometimes referred to as sketch models, concept models, prototypes, mock-ups or 3D sketches and are used to generate and experiment with ideas during the early conceptualisation phase of the design process. As part of this study, I used explorative sculpture to develop the characters in a screenplay for animation called Kiddo. The resulting explorative sculptures and the story they helped to shape are the central artefacts of the research. The research findings suggest that while explorative sculpture has limitations as a creativity support tool, it also has unique and useful attributes which, when used in combination with other tools, may facilitate the creative process during the early phases of animation and video game development. This study aims to focus and refine my practice as a teacher and maker of animation and games. It was led by my longstanding and persistent proclivity for sculpting, which has been developed across twenty years creating sculpture for museums, stop-motion animation, puppetry, special effects and character design. It was also catalysed when, as a teacher, I perceived a problematic tendency for courses and texts on developing animation and games to privilege text-based approaches to generating ideas. The dissertation that forms part of this study, contextualises explorative sculpture by investigating its use by artists and designers. To examine the process of explorative sculpting in my own practice, I utilised Sullivan’s thinking and making research model. Specifically, I prepared video recordings of my explorative sculpting sessions, during which I verbalised my thinking and decision-making process (Sullivan 2010). I also discuss explorative sculpture considering the following themes: Practicality, Physicality and Touch, Chance, Roughness and Ambiguity and Practitioner Preference. The development of these themes drew on my experience using explorative sculpture as a creativity support tool as well as existing research on cognition, design and creativity. The findings of this study suggest that explorative sculptures are less practical than twodimensional sketching and less useful for rendering a large quantity of rough and ambiguous iterations. However, explorative sculptures, by virtue of their threedimensionality, can convey useful haptic feedback, material qualities and visual information which may facilitate creative responses from students and practitioners of animation and games design. Explorative sculptures also lend themselves well to the incorporation of found objects and the influence of chance. They may also be useful for students and practitioners who benefit from the use of kinaesthetic and visual creativity support tools. I argue then, that explorative sculpting can be a useful creativity support tool for developing characters and stories for animation and games, especially when combined with conventional ideation methods like writing and two-dimensional sketching.
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ItemHurdy-gurdy: new articulations( 2016)The purpose of this thesis is to expand existing literature concerning the hurdy-gurdy as a contemporary musical instrument. Notably, it addresses the lack of hurdy-gurdy literature in the context of contemporary composition and performance. Research into this subject has been triggered by the author’s experience as a hurdy-gurdy performer and composer and the importance of investigating and documenting the hurdy-gurdy as an instrument capable of performing well outside the idioms of traditional music. This thesis consists of a collection of new works for hurdy-gurdy and investigation of existing literature including reference to the author’s personal experience as a hurdy-gurdy composer and performer. It will catalogue and systematically document a selection of hurdy-gurdy techniques and extended performance techniques, and demonstrate these within the practical context of new music compositions created by the author. This creative work and technique investigation and documentation is a valuable resource for those seeking deeper practical and academic understanding of the hurdy-gurdy within the context of contemporary music making.
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ItemChaos, order and uncertainty when writing narrative for animation( 2017)Advocating rules for inventing stories circumvents the complete experiences of writing. How can the writer best embrace uncertainty, draw on the known and expose their work to enlivening spontaneity? This research examines four animation projects written under different conditions using different approaches to making the narrative. Each work gradually leads to a direct approach, bringing the writing experience closer to the act of animating.
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ItemSuccessful character, story and theme, when writing a multiple protagonist screenplay: as investigated in the writing of the screenplay The Three Lucias( 2016)Sandra Sciberras who examined the challenges of audience engagement in writing a multi-protagonist film screenplay. Through writing and interrogating her feature film script, The Three Lucias, Sandra’s research explores how the multi-protagonist film can utilise a unifying thematic arc to promote strong audience engagement with a film’s characters and story.
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ItemVoiceover narration and audio-visual imagery in non-fiction film( 2015)This project investigates the relationship between audio-visual imagery and voiceover narration in non-fiction film. This thesis examines that relationship as a particular case of the broader relationship between perception and language in human cognition. I review arguments that the meanings of language are grounded in concepts acquired through perception and action, through embodied interaction with our environments. Despite this dependence of language on perception, cognitive science research shows that language exerts a significant influence over perception. For example, language has been shown to modulate visual processing at an early stage, affecting what we consciously see and remember, and attenuating bottom-up cognitive processes. I argue that the audio-visual (AV) imagery in non-fiction films is perceptually realistic, since it addresses a subset of the same perceptual abilities we use to perceive our environments. We might therefore expect the influence of voiceover narration on our perception of AV imagery to be similar to the influence of language on perception more generally. Several film theorists, including Michel Chion and Bill Nichols, have noted such an influence in their writings. My creative works are concerned with a number of issues raised by the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. I have experimented with the form of these video works, separating AV imagery and voiceover narration. The resulting form diverges from the most widely used structure in non-fiction films, the expository mode, in which AV imagery serves to illustrate the narrative content of the voiceover. The evidence presented in this thesis indicates that separation of these content streams will diminish the influence of language on viewers’ perception of AV imagery. The resulting epistemic independence of AV imagery in my video works emphasises the act of perception as central to questions on the nature of cognition and consciousness.
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ItemLooking again at Maya Deren: how the 'Mother of Avant-Garde Film' was a socially conscious 'Judaised Artist'( 2015)Russian-Jewish filmmaker, Maya Deren, known as the ‘mother of avant-garde film’, lived and worked in Greenwich Village, New York, from the 1930s until her death in 1961. Deren produced experimental films, wrote for a variety of magazines on her philosophy of art and civilisation, lectured around the United States, Canada and South America and established the Creative Film Foundation, a pioneering organisation that supported independent film-makers in America. Beyond being an educator and interested in film-art, Deren’s oeuvre revealed a strong social conscience. Leading up to her career in film, Deren’s poetry, photography, her Masters Thesis in English Literature, and her role as assistant to anthropological dancer Katherine Dunham and to prominent political activist and writer, Max Eastman, all evinced strong social components. I argue therefore that Deren is more than an experimental film-maker; she is a socially conscious artist. Following Deren’s immigration to New York with her family at age five, to escape anti-Semitic pogroms, she continued to spend her childhood and teenage years both escaping forms of anti-Semitism and on a continuous search for belonging. Deren’s work was coloured by this search and desire to navigate social and cultural alienation, resulting in an endeavor to create and promote morally responsible art that enabled civilisational progress and, most significantly, unity. This was to be created by the morally responsible ‘artist’, who Deren established as being a self-constructed and socially reflective figure that evolved with the socio-cultural context. By exploring Deren within her early to mid twentieth century American environment, I reveal that Deren’s use of ‘the artist’ parallels the use of ‘the Jew’ as a cultural symbol, through which ideas of inclusion or exclusion from social and cultural life can be navigated. Deren, I therefore argue, must be read within the wider context of ‘Judaised’ discourse in America, in which ‘the Jew’ was a symbol through which to approach larger ideas of integration, assimilation and Americanisation. My study explores the history of ‘Judaised’ discourse in America in the twentieth century, its use by an array of artists, including Deren, as well as closely analysing Deren’s theoretical texts and films in order to understand Deren and her oeuvre in a nuanced manner and to cement a place for Deren within both ‘Judaised’ history and twentieth-century America.
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ItemOn the same page: an exploration of the co-screenwriting experience( 2014)Most commercial screen product created in the last century has been the result of collaboration between two or more writers. However, while there exists a significant body of research into the areas of both ‘collaboration’ and ‘screenwriting’, very little exists which interrogates their nexus. This practice-led thesis begins to address that gap by firstly investigating the process of co-screenwriting through my writing collaboration with John Studley on the feature-length screenplay, The Last Resort. Throughout the writing of the screenplay I maintained observational diaries, transcribed audio recordings of writing sessions and reflected on communication and collaboration patterns. Secondly, this thesis also attempts to contextualise this collaboration between two screenwriters constructing a feature-length screenplay by examining various co-authoring models used. In spite of the fact that the majority of film scripts are credited to one writer, I suggest that collaborative screenwriting within the film industry is highly prevalent, particularly in Hollywood, where it takes many guises, both overt and covert, willing and unwilling. I further suggest that historically, the rigid modern screenplay format used by many contemporary screenwriters developed as a by-product of studio-enforced collaborations during the silent-movie era of Hollywood and, therefore, this particular form of the screenplay may be ideally suited to co-writing. Through the examination of my own collaborative screenwriting practices, I conclude that a prolonged and well-considered prewriting phase may be highly desirable to the quality of the final screenplay and the health of the collaborative process. I propose that conversational collaboration (writing every word together) can be an effective technique between two screenwriters; and that conversational collaboration significantly enhances the vocabulary required to successfully co-write and strengthens what is, possibly, the most important ingredient of all successful collaborations: trust.
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ItemDocumentary access: an examination of access in the production of the observational and participatory documentary in the commissioned environment (based on "Community Cop"[Gaynor 2009])( 2012)Documentary Access is a practice-based analysis of the issue of access in the observational and participatory documentary filmmaking modes (as proposed by documentary theorist Bill Nichols in Representing Reality [Nichols 1991]) and the meeting of stakeholder expectations. Nichols’ modes identify particular traits and conventions of different documentary styles. Access is central to the observational and participatory modes because content and narrative form is derived from the filmmaker’s direct and unscripted access to people, events and places. The analyses of what this access signifies in a formalised filmic sense, provides a key to understanding what the recorded content delivers in terms of the filmic narrative, stakeholder expectations and possible conflicts between these two elements. The study is based on methodologies developed and data gathered during the creation of a fifty-two minute broadcast documentary Community Cop (Gaynor 2009). The creative work follows the Community Liaison Officer at the Flemington Police station and members of the local African Australian community as they strive to resolve long term conflicts. The field study and dissertation reveal and analyse issues in the evaluation of access from both a filmic and stakeholder perspective that can have serious implications for filmmakers working in the observational and participatory modes. This dissertation proposes a set of references for analysing types and implications of access and proposes a set of responses to the often-inevitable clash between proposition and actuality in these modes.
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Item“Kill Bigfoot”: constructing a cinematic relationship between character, the city and nature( 2012)The purpose of my research is to explore the relationship between representations of cinematic space and character in dramatic fiction film. Specifically, my focus is on representations of city dystopias and natural landscapes in dramas that investigate human nature. This dissertation is an examination of the issues encountered in drawing from this research during the writing of Kill Bigfoot, a scenario whose narrative takes place across these two worlds: the urban dystopia of a future New York, and the natural word of the Australian wilderness. It includes the motivation, influences, interests and methodology that guided my writing process, and a discussion of the core ideas that underpin my work. The qualitative, practice-led research undertaken during my masters consisted of analysing films that have used representations of the natural world and cities to explore the human condition, as well as the study of texts on film, philosophy, religion and myth. Picnic at Hanging Rock, Blade Runner, Brazil, Children of Men and Taxi Driver were focal points for my research, as were the films of Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog. My research regarding representations of dystopias on screen inevitably included work on cities and urbanity on screen, from both internal (the experience of the inhabitants of these spaces) and external (the design of these spaces) perspectives. Thomas Hobbes on human nature, and then George Simmel, Henri Lefebvre and Marc Augé on cities, urbanity, modernity and post-modernity, were critical to my research and to the development of Part One of Kill Bigfoot. Turning to the natural world of Part Two, the ideas of Martin Lefebvre were most influential. Friedrich Nietzsche and the various Vienna Schools of psychoanalysis shaped my understanding of my protagonist Bill’s driving need, which was the substantive link between the two parts of Kill Bigfoot, his inner world that is at the heart of the drama, and our own world. My study ultimately considers the interrelationship between the dramatisation of character, cinematic space and ideas of human nature in film dystopias. The research indicates that not all filmmakers explore this relationship in the development of their scripts or the use of settings in their films. However, for those filmmakers who do so through the use of dystopic cities, it often expresses a point of view on the competing forces within us that shape the world, and how the same world shapes us. Understanding our urban point of view (or “gaze”) required Bill to enter the counterpoint of his dystopic city – the natural landscape of Australia. My study therefore also involves observations about the representation of the natural world in cinema and its relationship to our inner nature.