Steve Thomas – The process of documentary production.

This amazing guest lecture by Steve Thomas broke down the journey of a story in filmmaking. I was really inspired by Thomas when he went into details of the restricted parameters in short film, his experience about it and what we could learn of it. For narratives and film requirement, Thomas related this to 3 key aspects of the journey:

- Journey of the story (mostly the participant’s journey, often from the past)
- Participant’s journey in making the film (wanting to make a film by interess).
- Filmmaker’s journey in making the film (use of a story teller).

Breaking down on how to view the participant and the journey, this taught me on how the journey, is more than a story of a character – it can be an own thought, a drama, a product if not more. This was shown through the linear versus non-linear construction of a doco and what unfolds in someone’s lives. Paul briefly mentioned on how we had constructed news, was quite similar to doco production – overlay, overlay, overlay, interview/grab, overlay,overlay and so on. This is the classic structure of equilibrium, the journey of the hero, where the character finds a way.

In editing Yianni, what Steve Thomas and Paul talked about in this lecture, is what I will implement into our doco, because “truth is stronger than fiction”. The refugee story ‘Hope’ touched on this together with the relationship formed with the filmmaker. It’s a survival story with beautiful framings, background music and the Yarra River as the Tigrees River. But the most important point of this type of filmmaking here is: ‘it is rather than doing something on a subject, it is with a subject, with challenges, taking the audience into the journey too”.

New words taught: challenging, voyaging and story telling. Why? Because as filmmakers and doco makers, we must remember that most people viewing this are struggling in the same position, and therefore we must look for the contradiction and the paradoxes of it, in order to demonstrate the human condition and the human nature of the particular story.