Scope SCREEN INDUSTRY VIEWS
SHORT FILMS GIVEN SHORT SHRIFT? Rochelle Siemienowicz
Once upon a time, short films were seen as the key to a successful Australian filmmaking career. Ideally, at the start of your professional trajectory, you’d make a stunningly crafted short film that would win awards locally or receive recognition internationally at Cannes, Venice or Berlin. Maybe your short film would even win an Oscar, like Adam Elliot’s Harvie Krumpet (2003) or Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann’s The Lost Thing (2010) did. Then you would be supported to make a feature film, and away you’d go. Or that was the plan, anyway; successful shorts have never guaranteed sustained filmmaking careers. But, since the Australian filmmaking renaissance of the 1970s and the establishment of our film schools – including the Australian Film Television and Radio School, the Swinburne Film and Television School, and the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) – around the same time, the short film has held a sacred place in the industry as a training ground, stepping stone and artform in its own right. While numerous short films continue to be made and submitted to dedicated short-film festivals like Tropfest, Flickerfest and the St Kilda Film Festival, Donna Lyon suggests that ‘the short film as we used to know it is dead’. Speaking to me in a 2019 interview for screenhub, Lyon – associate director for teaching and learning at the VCA and a film producer herself, with a number of short films under her belt – recounted her experience of overseeing the huge project of digitising and making accessible all the school’s graduation films since 1966. Following a public exhibition in October, the historic archive of over 500 celluloid films and 1200 magnetic tapes – including early works by filmmakers such as Ariel Kleiman, Justin Kurzel, Robert Luketic, Billie Pleffer and Corrie Chen – is now available for researchers, film students and the interested public alongside the projects of all VCA students (graduating or otherwise). In light of the completion of this extensive archival work, Lyon does take pains to clarify that she’s ‘not arguing that we shouldn’t keep making [short films]’: ‘They’re a celebrated cultural icon and an important way to build, refine and test your craft. I just think we need
126 • Metro Magazine 203 | © ATOM
to think more carefully about story and audience in a flooded market, and how much we’re spending on them.’ Screen Australia no longer funds standalone shorts except as proofs-of-concept for longer projects, through its story-development funding. But, while the short film may not be the prestigious industry calling card it once was, the form is far from dead – even where the screen agencies are concerned. Film Victoria, for instance, told me by email that it still ‘fund[s] short form content through initiatives with market partners’. These include continued support for the St Kilda Film Festival alongside the Indigenous-focused initiative NITV Treaty Docs, the ABC Content Initiative and the SBS Scripted Short Initiative. On a related note, in September, SBS on Demand ran the SBS Short Film Festival, a three-day showcase of short films made through a partnership between SBS and five Australian screen agencies: Film Victoria, Screen Queensland, Screenwest, the South Australian Film Corporation and Screen Tasmania. The four scripted and ten nonscripted short-form productions were in keeping with the multicultural broadcaster’s mandate, celebrating diversity and featuring creatives from under-represented communities. Having retreated from short-film viewing myself in recent years, I watched four of these rather worthy-sounding SBS shorts as research for this column. I found them unexpectedly compelling. First on my list was the heartwarming festival opener, Out of Range (John Harvey, 2019), featuring Aaron Pedersen as a struggling actor taking a road trip with his estranged twelve-year-old son (Araluen Lee Baxter). The film is the kind of lyrical, artfully shot short that audiences tend to rate highly. Then there was the suspenseful Tribunal (Mason Fleming, 2019) – inspired by real-world newspaper articles – about an Afghan asylum seeker (Mansoor Noor) facing a barrage of embarrassing questions from officials trying to prove that he is not ‘gay enough’ to be granted refugee status. The only person who can help him is his translator (Shideh Faramand), whose kids happen to be obsessed with RuPaul’s Drag Race. Next up was Limited Surrender (2019), about writer/director Kirsty Martinsen’s quest to maintain an art practice while living with multiple sclerosis. The film documents her real-life experience of learning to paint using the wheels of her chair to mark big canvases on the floor. Finally, busting several disability stereotypes was The Loop (Lorcan Hopper & Johanis Lyons-Reid, 2019), a documentary tracing Hopper’s work as a first-time TV director living with Down syndrome and working with soap-opera actors on the autism spectrum. These stories may not be as sprawling as those in feature films or TV series, but they nevertheless do their work quickly and beautifully – both on screen and in the consciousness of their viewers.
This page, L–R: Out of Range; Limited Surrender
Scope SCREEN INDUSTRY VIEWS
SHORT FILMS GIVEN SHORT SHRIFT? Rochelle Siemienowicz
Once upon a time, short films were seen as the key to a successful Australian filmmaking career. Ideally, at the start of your professional trajectory, you’d make a stunningly crafted short film that would win awards locally or receive recognition internationally at Cannes, Venice or Berlin. Maybe your short film would even win an Oscar, like Adam Elliot’s Harvie Krumpet (2003) or Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann’s The Lost Thing (2010) did. Then you would be supported to make a feature film, and away you’d go. Or that was the plan, anyway; successful shorts have never guaranteed sustained filmmaking careers. But, since the Australian filmmaking renaissance of the 1970s and the establishment of our film schools – including the Australian Film Television and Radio School, the Swinburne Film and Television School, and the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) – around the same time, the short film has held a sacred place in the industry as a training ground, stepping stone and artform in its own right. While numerous short films continue to be made and submitted to dedicated short-film festivals like Tropfest, Flickerfest and the St Kilda Film Festival, Donna Lyon suggests that ‘the short film as we used to know it is dead’. Speaking to me in a 2019 interview for screenhub, Lyon – associate director for teaching and learning at the VCA and a film producer herself, with a number of short films under her belt – recounted her experience of overseeing the huge project of digitising and making accessible all the school’s graduation films since 1966. Following a public exhibition in October, the historic archive of over 500 celluloid films and 1200 magnetic tapes – including early works by filmmakers such as Ariel Kleiman, Justin Kurzel, Robert Luketic, Billie Pleffer and Corrie Chen – is now available for researchers, film students and the interested public alongside the projects of all VCA students (graduating or otherwise). In light of the completion of this extensive archival work, Lyon does take pains to clarify that she’s ‘not arguing that we shouldn’t keep making [short films]’: ‘They’re a celebrated cultural icon and an important way to build, refine and test your craft. I just think we need
126 • Metro Magazine 203 | © ATOM
to think more carefully about story and audience in a flooded market, and how much we’re spending on them.’ Screen Australia no longer funds standalone shorts except as proofs-of-concept for longer projects, through its story-development funding. But, while the short film may not be the prestigious industry calling card it once was, the form is far from dead – even where the screen agencies are concerned. Film Victoria, for instance, told me by email that it still ‘fund[s] short form content through initiatives with market partners’. These include continued support for the St Kilda Film Festival alongside the Indigenous-focused initiative NITV Treaty Docs, the ABC Content Initiative and the SBS Scripted Short Initiative. On a related note, in September, SBS on Demand ran the SBS Short Film Festival, a three-day showcase of short films made through a partnership between SBS and five Australian screen agencies: Film Victoria, Screen Queensland, Screenwest, the South Australian Film Corporation and Screen Tasmania. The four scripted and ten nonscripted short-form productions were in keeping with the multicultural broadcaster’s mandate, celebrating diversity and featuring creatives from under-represented communities. Having retreated from short-film viewing myself in recent years, I watched four of these rather worthy-sounding SBS shorts as research for this column. I found them unexpectedly compelling. First on my list was the heartwarming festival opener, Out of Range (John Harvey, 2019), featuring Aaron Pedersen as a struggling actor taking a road trip with his estranged twelve-year-old son (Araluen Lee Baxter). The film is the kind of lyrical, artfully shot short that audiences tend to rate highly. Then there was the suspenseful Tribunal (Mason Fleming, 2019) – inspired by real-world newspaper articles – about an Afghan asylum seeker (Mansoor Noor) facing a barrage of embarrassing questions from officials trying to prove that he is not ‘gay enough’ to be granted refugee status. The only person who can help him is his translator (Shideh Faramand), whose kids happen to be obsessed with RuPaul’s Drag Race. Next up was Limited Surrender (2019), about writer/director Kirsty Martinsen’s quest to maintain an art practice while living with multiple sclerosis. The film documents her real-life experience of learning to paint using the wheels of her chair to mark big canvases on the floor. Finally, busting several disability stereotypes was The Loop (Lorcan Hopper & Johanis Lyons-Reid, 2019), a documentary tracing Hopper’s work as a first-time TV director living with Down syndrome and working with soap-opera actors on the autism spectrum. These stories may not be as sprawling as those in feature films or TV series, but they nevertheless do their work quickly and beautifully – both on screen and in the consciousness of their viewers.
This page, L–R: Out of Range; Limited Surrender
COOPERATIVE GAMEPLAY: MAKING VIDEOGAMES MORE SUSTAINABLE Dan Golding
Melbourne International Games Week (MIGW), always the nucleus of the Australian videogames calendar, had a noticeably distinct flavour in 2019. Established by the Victorian Government, MIGW runs in October and usually sees a convergence of developers, industry, press and players at various coordinated and semi-coordinated events across Melbourne. People take in the state of the industry, try to get traction for their own projects, socialise and gossip – much like any other industry gathering. Creative Victoria claims that 60,000 people attend each year, the majority of whom are to be found at the Penny Arcade Expo (usually referred to as ‘PAX’), the single largest segment of MIGW and the only one aimed squarely at the public. Though PAX Australia has existed since 2013, and MIGW, as a branded, yearly event, only since 2015, last year’s instalment felt different, both positively and negatively. Maybe it was the pall held over the games industry since a brief bout of #MeToo revelations worldwide dating back to August. For many years, it seemed unlikely that anything resembling #MeToo would ever happen in the games sector. The events of Gamergate unfolded in 2014 and seemed to make it clear that women and minorities speaking out would receive limited to no support from the industry or its representatives. Ground was given to loud, misogy nistic voices, and battlelines were drawn. So it was almost to the industry’s astonishment that, in August 2019, almost five years to the day since Gamergate began, a rapid cascade of testimonies came forth, naming and shaming some highprofile abusers within the games sector. Open secrets now became matters of public record. For a brief moment, it looked like real traction would be made – and, indeed, an airing was had on at least a rudimentary scale. That ended when one prominent game developer, accused of abuse and harassment, was found dead days after allegations were raised against him. Shock once again took the games industry: not just at the fact that these figures could have been accused of such heinous acts, but also because, somehow, this as a flashpoint might reignite the days at the height of Gamergate when women were systematically harassed and excluded. This was just one context for MIGW in 2019. What had been, in previous years, a rite of celebration for what seemed to perpetually be an underdog industry was now raw, bleak and pained. Another context was the rapidly changing industry, both locally and internationally. It is now harder than ever to make a sustainable career in videogames, an industry reality that is quickly becoming more and more heavily entrenched. In 2018, for example, not one of the top ten highest-grossing mobile games globally was released that same year, while, on popular platform Steam, only three of the top twelve PC-playable games landed in the market in 2018. What both cases arguably point to is the slow burn of financial return for game-making. It’s often said that the videogame industry is worth US$130 billion, but it’s less often noted that 44 per cent of that astronomical n umber is accounted for by just five companies. This is hardly the lean startup paradise it is often advertised as. The industry is a corporate oligopoly, structured by ‘democratic’ open-distribution platforms.
Above: 2018 top-grossing mobile game Arena of Valor
The way the videogames landscape has been reshaped in the decade following the global financial crisis was the topic of Brendan Keogh’s closing keynote at MIGW’s industry conference, Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP). Keogh is a researcher at Queensland University of Technology and has been working on a large-scale research project to chart Australia’s industry. So far, he’s interviewed almost 200 Australian game developers – which represents a significant cross-section of the entire national industry (which the Australian Bureau of Statistics put at 734 people in 2016, though it has likely grown since). No-one is better placed than Keogh to assess the fortunes of Australia’s videogames sector. His assessment was, therefore, in many ways, bleak. ‘No-one has any money,’ he said. ‘Nothing feels stable, and everyone is exhausted.’ Keogh pointed to thirty-five as a ‘cliff’ in the age range of his respondents: despite Australia’s games industry having existed since the 1980s, it’s still overwhelmingly do minated by twentysomethings. A game developer over the age of forty-five is an extreme rarity. Keogh also shared the responses he got to the question, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’ – of which one was the stark ‘Fucking no idea. No idea at all.’ Yet there is actually reason for genuine hope here. Keogh argued that a reassessment of how the industry works in Australia is in order. The traditional view has been to see it as something like a singular, massed industry of jobs and companies, structured by platforms and international investment. Instead, Keogh advocated for a quadripartite split: first, the tentpole companies, which have offices and hire people; second, the industry, which largely consists of small, two- to five-person companies; third, the scene, made up of solo developers, artists and collectives; and finally, the students, who, Keogh noted dryly, are ‘in for a rude shock’. This stratification of the Australian games sector, far from being a sign of division and weakness, is a strength unseen anywhere else in the world. This is actually a broad base, and offers the foundations for what Keogh described as ‘a very different kind of game industry’. What in other nations can look like big companies compe ting for resources, work and employees in Australia looks more like resource-sharing. While big videogames industries like those in the US, Canada, the UK and Japan are dominated by top-down corporations, on local shores, we have a genuine chance for work to be driven by communities and collectives, and for solidarity to come from workers and not the needs of multinationals. There is a basis here, argued Keogh, for fostering an industry that thinks about game developers – and not game companies – first. Despite all the pain and the uncertainty, this is a rare moment, a junction point for our industry. Australia’s videogames are for the making.
www.metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 203 • 127
compares Context to earlier tech-type ‘experiences’ such as 2014 low-budget horror film Unfriended (Leo Gabriadze) and 2018 psychological thriller Searching (Aneesh Chaganty). She also notes that the series’ Liz Giuffre staggered release ‘weekly at 6 p.m. Sydney time’ undoubtedly sought to ‘attract the atContent is a 2019 web series produced by tention of commuters looking for entertainBrisbane-based Ludo Studio and the ABC, ment on their phones’. with support from Screen Australia and Throughout its first season, Content Screen Queensland. The seven-episode title proves that it is not just an exercise in broke new ground by being created specifitechnological novelty. Yes, in terms of charcally for mobile devices, meaning that its acterisation and drama, the show treads presentation was optimised for vertical viewfamiliar ground – so much so that, at times, ing – touted by the studio as a world-first Lucy and Daisy feel almost as over the for scripted comedy (and, indeed, previously top as other great female duos like Broad seen only in rare contexts such as Australia’s City’s Ilana (Ilana Glazer) and Abbi (Abbi Vertical Film Festival). The show mimics Jacobson), or Australia’s own brilliant Kath the presentation of apps like Instagram, (Jane Turner) and Kim (Gina Riley) from the Facebook and Messenger, and we also see eponymous TV series. Having said that, a smartphone pop-up graphics like those for thirty-second clip from the show’s first epimessages, notifications and alarms. sode showing an apparently live-streamed Above: Content The experience of watching and listencar crash was so believable that, within ing in this way is simultaneously familiar and two hours of being posted on Twitter, it unusual. So many of us consume media on was reportedly viewed more than 775,000 mobile devices daily – short clips from television or film that have times. As Sebag-Montefiore offers, Content’s creators ‘wanted been shared via social media; amateur videos or pieces circulated by to ensure that the phone format would aid their storytelling rather friends and family; or programs on Netflix or other streaming services than smother it’. – as part of our attempts to claim back some ‘me time’ while on pubFor all of its potential, there is an underlying sense of incompletelic transport or waiting for takeaway. But, while Content is designed ness in Content, too. Perhaps this is because everything happens so for mobile viewing and, thus, does not look alien, the experience quickly and – understandably, given the form’s constraints – in such of passivity certainly is. Each episode demands that, for somewhere small pieces, which means ideas that would have been explored between seven and seventeen minutes, we focus on that little screen more deeply and explicitly in longer-form work become harder to while ignoring its other possibilities. Each pop-up forms part of the grasp. The series is also limited by visual and sound factors, like a story and progresses the internal narrative of the show, but also smaller frame and less technically advanced soundtrack. But it will prompts an almost impossible-to-deny impulse to ‘click through’ on be interesting to see how the showrunners develop the characters our part. If nothing else, the show brings into sharp focus just how and narrative into the future. It might even make more sense to start much we actually ‘do’ while we’re ‘doing nothing’ on our phones. over, with an upgrade or update of sorts. As ABC executive produ The show’s content is driven by the friendship between Lucy cer Que Minh Luu explained to The Guardian last year, in testing the (Charlotte Nicdao) and Daisy (Gemma Bird Matheson). The young Content before its release, the production team found that audien women are a classic odd couple in terms of their opposing person ces ‘understood that this way of absorbing a story could be funny alities and clearly different trajectories, but their shared language and dramatic and engaging to watch’. online draws them together. There are moments when they should, and do, justifiably hate each other, yet the digital medium and its intricacies connects them in a way that only really makes sense as part of the immersive experience of watching and reading along Rochelle Siemienowicz is a writer and critic with a PhD in Australian with them. Content’s story includes not just ‘public’ actions like cinema. She is a journalist for screenhub and was co-host of the Instagram posts and stories, but also the ‘in-progress’ and ‘draft’ long-running film podcast Hell Is for Hyphenates. pieces that digital meaning-making relies on. The ellipses that appear on screen as a reply is being composed and the process Dan Golding was, from 2014 to 2017, the director of the Freeplay of correcting or deleting a post before it is published are used as Independent Games Festival, and is a senior lecturer in media and narrative devices to really impressive effect as well. communications at Swinburne University of Technology. He is also a Content has drawn international attention for its innovation and freelance arts and videogames journalist, and the co-author of Game ambition – not least because it is the ‘next big thing’ to come out Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of of Ludo. (The first, and still biggest, is the children’s show Bluey, Videogames with Leena van Deventer. of course – and, for the record, Content could be no further from its predecessor in terms of approach, though there is a clear similarity in Dr Liz Giuffre is a senior lecturer in communication at the University terms of sheer commitment, artistry and nuance.) In her round-up of of Technology Sydney as well as a freelance arts commentator the show for The New York Times, critic Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore and journalist. m
CONTENT: GIVING DIGITAL STORYTELLING A NEW ORIENTATION
•••
128 • Metro Magazine 203 | © ATOM