The screenplay Into Dust (2020) is an apocalyptic family-drama written as the major component of my PhD project to investigate and record the creative process of transnational screenwriting. The screenplay as presented has been shaped through ongoing practice-based research under the mentorship of industry professionals at Lancaster University, UK, and showcases screenwriting practice in the academic arena.

My research explores the adaptation of a novel employing modernist tropes into a film screenplay, questioning the validity of the traditional, hierarchical source/palimpsest model of the adaptive process. The source work – my draft novel, Flying – employs the techniques that make the modernist novel challenging for screen narrative, including shifting internal realities, dreams, fluid frames of reference, dreams, stream of consciousness, interior monologue, multiple points of view, non-linear subjective and linear objective time.

Golems Inc explores the ways storytelling is used as a defining feature of what it means to be human in posthuman noir science fiction. The subgenre posthuman noir can be summarised as: a screen text set in a future with posthuman technology which uses multiple tropes of traditional film noir—aesthetics, structures, characters and themes—to validate the human qualities of emotional awakening and storytelling as crucial for survival (Gee 2016).  Although the screen texts within this subgenre touch on transhumanism and posthumanism, they ultimately privilege anthropocentric human qualities of emotion and storytelling.

In 1991 film theorist, Bill Nichols, developed a typology of documentary film, which aimed to identify the different types or categories of documentary, by identifying the aesthetic tropes associated with each individual mode. For this project, emphasis is placed on what he called the poetic mode.

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The poetic mode has many facets, but they all emphasize the ways in which the filmmaker’s voice gives fragments of the historical world a formal aesthetic integrity peculiar to the film itself (Nichols 2001b, 105).

Every life narrative is composed of reflections that weave the itinerary of experience and feed a tension between the singular and the universal, acting on the possibility of inventing the history itself and arising from motivations such as confession, justification and elaboration of meanings (Calligaris 1998), spreading in formats such as biographies, autobiographies, letters and diaries. In the film Prayers Out of Closet (Preces Fora do Armário, 2018), I create a relationship between autobiographical act and other characters to address my difficulty in reconciling religion and sexual diversity. 

Between the Tides is a short documentary film that follows recreational fisherman Hiroaki Nakamura in the lead up to catching his 1000th barramundi from waters around Darwin in the Northern Territory. Wild fish stocks depend on healthy vegetation and Darwin Harbour has some of the most extensive and diverse mangrove forests in the world. Featured in the documentary, environmental scientist Madeline Goddard provides an outline of mangrove forest ecosystem functions and imminent threats to their future.

Electroacoustic composer Tim Howle and filmmaker Nick Cope have been collaborating on a series of visual music films since 2002. Cross-disciplinary and inter-departmental in nature, the work contributes to creative media practice-based research in the academy. Specifically, the collaboration, and this work, contribute to audiovisual/visual music practices and their contexts; video art histories and practice, sonic arts and acousmatic/electroacoustic composition, screen media practices and audiovisual composition and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

In this digital paper Characters, Interrupted (2020) [1], screen theorist Stella Bruzzi says documentary is the ‘triangular relationship between the subject, the filmmaker and also the audience’ (6:07), and that ‘a documentary comes into being when it is being made’ (5:58). I agree with Bruzzi that documentaries can be viewed as being created, and when they are viewed in this relational way that it becomes important to understand more about the relationships that contribute to the creation of the work.

Gender imbalances in contemporary Japan are intimately observed through multifarious character studies in Gwen Isaac’s current documentary research project, Tokyo Woman. As a practising filmmaker and lecturer at Massey University’s School of Creative Media Production in New Zealand, Gwen focuses her lens on urban women who embody facets of gender inequities in modern Japan. Gwen’s approach to filming informs her teaching practice, positioning future filmmakers to be ‘glocal’ in outlook. The term ‘glocal’, when appropriated by screen production, argues for equipping new filmmakers to capture global stories while adjusting their practice to local conditions.

The Burning is a short drama that sits identifiably in the traditions of historical film.  However, I must emphasise that this work does not seek to demonstrate innovations in film form or storytelling.  I am presenting The Burning not as a text for analysis, but as part of a research enquiry into ‘Modes of Creative Practice’ in fiction filmmaking.  I have developed this concept as part of my research interest in how filmmakers create films. It is an enquiry that is quite separate from a textual approach to film practice research.

This research begins with Jo Spence and Rosy Martin’s notion that the selective nature and the subsequent ignoring of aspects of family life such as power imbalances and contradictions creates a gap between our family images and our own memory (1992, 50). It aims to aesthetically explore the experience of such disjuncture and the drive to reconcile this. As such, it looks at the need to reassert against our family images as Fabien Arribert-Narce discusses, “the violence of a personal history, of desires and fantasies, and of shameful secrets…to write everything that is not shown” (2008, 56).

As a film school educator and a keen proponent of cultural enterprise, a question that has always been close to my heart is: How do independent filmmakers build and sustain a career in the global screen industries of the 21st century?

This practice-led PhD project explores the TikTok short-form video format in the context of the city symphony phenomenon (Jacobs, Hielscher and Kinik 2018). Ice City: Harbin will develop an original storytelling mode for the emerging format of networked mobile media. To this end, the research applies a creative arts method and will involve the creation of a series of 15 short videos on the video-sharing platform TikTok.

As a screenwriter and film maker I was drawn to VR when content started to become more freely available at international film festivals in 2017-2018. However, I felt constantly disappointed at the experiences on offer, which didn’t seem to be making the best use of the technology and the immersive environment it could create. In particular, VR filmmakers were constantly using “tricks” to make sure the viewer was looking where the creator required them to look at any given moment. It occurred to me that many of these new experiences could be compared to the works of early filmmakers who were exploring the new technology of film with their existing knowledge of drama from the world of theatre: the “grammar “of filmmaking had yet to be developed.