School of Film and TV - Theses

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    Reincarnation, rebirth, transmigration
    Phoenix, Sumitra ( 2016)
    This thesis sought to examine the common elements in reincarnation beliefs, as encountered in stories from world religions and cultures, in scholarly literature and studies, in films made from 1990 to 2010, and in the lived experiences of thirty yoga practitioners over the past fifty years. It then sought to incorporate these recurring themes into the screenplay and the final production of an engaging, hand drawn, narrative, animated film.
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    Explorative sculpture as a creativity support tool for developing characters and stories for animation
    Wallace, Justine ( 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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    Dissenting fiction re-righting law: practice-led research into biopolitics, women’s rights and reproductive justice in Ecuador
    Galarza, Maria Teresa ( 2017)
    Through a feature-length screenplay and accompanying dissertation this creative practice as research project addresses questions of biopolitics, women’s rights and reproductive justice. The research focuses on my own country, Ecuador, but alludes to a broader Latin American context. In this research, the practice of fiction screenplay writing configured my own understanding of the addressed issues. Based on this understanding, in the dissertation, reflecting upon “The Ladies Room” screenplay, I formulate an explanation around these issues. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on the legislative context of “The Ladies Room” story. The second, third, fourth and fifth chapters articulate the possible world the screenplay proposes, relative to our four protagonists, respectively. The first chapter juxtaposes Ecuadorian Constitutional and Criminal Law, and public policy, against international human rights instruments with regard to women’s rights. Through the screenplay’s character of Isabel, the second chapter interrogates reproductive coercion and access to safe abortion, the notion of potentiality (not) to, the institution of motherhood and the practice of mothering. The third chapter revolves around Marcia, and how this female character embodies forms of biopolitical power that discipline the body and regulate the population; this chapter also reflects upon the family as an institution and the differential valuation between productive and reproductive work. In the fourth chapter, I understand Alice as a gendered configuration of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and it is through her that the screenplay investigates the possibilities of speaking and been heard, the historically conflicting appearance of women before law, and contemporary forms of thanatopolitics. The fifth chapter interrogates the notion of “unwanted” children, articulated by the character of a little girl, Karlita. This proposes a reflection about a child, any child, as a being-after-birth, the pure possibility of a life, that is a life-to-be-mothered, characterized by a constitutive relationality. The dissertation’s final chapter argues for the necessity of beings-after-birth to create another form of biopolitics, one that is no longer a technology of power over life, but of power of life.
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    Hurdy-gurdy: new articulations
    Nowotnik, Piotr ( 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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    Chaos, order and uncertainty when writing narrative for animation
    Stephenson, Robert ( 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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    Successful character, story and theme, when writing a multiple protagonist screenplay: as investigated in the writing of the screenplay The Three Lucias
    SCIBERRAS, SANDRA ( 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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    Voiceover narration and audio-visual imagery in non-fiction film
    Lines, Jeremy ( 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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    Looking again at Maya Deren: how the 'Mother of Avant-Garde Film' was a socially conscious 'Judaised Artist'
    HOFFMAN, ARIELE ( 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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    What makes a filmmaker make films? A theoretical model & analytical method for the interrogation of filmmaking practice
    Warner, Christopher David ( 2014)
    Scholarly research on filmmaking practice from a filmmaker’s point of view is rare, with existing studies mostly focusing on the making of feature films. The research presented in this thesis demonstrates that it is both possible and useful to systematically describe, structure, and assess the significance of some of the more notable factors that affect and shape a much broader range of filmmaking practices, the impulses that motivate them, and the films they generate. Part I of this thesis addresses the theoretically-based Research Question 1: "What is a theoretical model for the analysis of filmmaking practice that is: 1) from a filmmaker’s point of view; 2) comprehensive; and 3) structured and systematic?" After establishing that there are no existing models of filmmaking or any other creative practice that meet these three criteria, a new theoretical model called the Practice-Space Model of Filmmaking is proposed and described. This model is sited within a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework that draws on elements of existential phenomenology psychology, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the “sociology of power”, Storper and Salais’ economic theory of “worlds of production”, and the Hindu notion of purushartha or “goals of life”, as modernised by Mohandas Gandhi. Part II of this thesis addresses the empirically-based Research Question 2: "Can the Practice-Space Model of Filmmaking: 1) be operationalised; and 2) be useful in the analysis of Chris Warner’s filmmaking practice between January 1978 and December 1991?" Utilising an analytic autoethnographic case study method and cross-modal data collection, the operationalisation of the analytical method associated with the Practice-Space Model introduced in Part I is demonstrated by applying it to a 14-year period in the author’s own filmmaking practice in Australia, during which he was the sole or joint filmmaker of nine completed films and two uncompleted film projects. The results of this analysis of a limited section of Australian filmmaking practice demonstrate that the Practice-Space Model of Filmmaking is both practicable and useful, and suggest the basis for more broadly-applicable further iterations of the Model.
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    On the same page: an exploration of the co-screenwriting experience
    O'Keefe, Andrew ( 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.