RELATIONSHIPS: How a Trinity friendship led to on-screen business success

David Elliot-Jones, Louis Dai and Lachlan McLeod met at Trinity College during O-Week in 2007. At the time, they could never have foreseen that one day they would own a video production company together.

BY EMILY McAULIFFE

‘Hmm, I can’t remember.’ Dave’s eyes dart behind his glasses as he looks skyward, searching for the memory of meeting Lachlan for the first time.

‘Really? You can’t remember our first moment?’ Lachlan retorts, with a disappointed shake of his head.

‘Well, can you?’

Silence.

The initial meeting of Lachlan McLeod and David Elliot-Jones – who would later become business partners – seemingly wasn’t very memorable.

On the other hand, Lachlan’s first interaction with third business partner, Louis Dai, is memorable, because Louis fell asleep mid-conversation. They were on a College boat cruise, it was late, and either Louis was tired or Lachlan was boring. It depends on who you ask.

With the three reminiscing about their O-Week experiences, Dave suddenly pipes up, having recovered an early impression of Lachlan, who lived directly opposite him in Upper Cowan. ‘Actually, I remember Lachie being very polite, kind of like my dad or something.’

Despite their less-than-inspiring first impressions, the three freshers gradually found more things in common and bonded over their shared love of music, The Office (‘The UK version, of course’), and their interest in making short films around campus.

The Walking Fish Productions trio: David Elliot-Jones, Louis Dai and Lachlan McLeod

The trio’s first ‘big’ film was made for the Trinity film festival and was about their mutual friend’s obsession with pigeons. ‘It was a strange film,’ Lachlan reflects.

Following on from this, the first film that brought the students notoriety outside Trinity College, with a screening at the Brunswick Film Festival, was a short film about Dave having nobody to celebrate his birthday with him. The twist? He was thrown a surprise party by a collection of soft toys. Lachlan: ‘Yeah, that was strange as well.’

Lachlan’s interest in films came from making home videos while growing up and a short course in videography, completed after he finished high school. Louis, who was intent on becoming a journalist, and Dave, a fellow media and communications student who was cutting his teeth in student radio, say they simply liked watching films, and didn’t have a desire to make them until they started playing around with a Handycam at Trinity.

‘The College environment enabled some of those early film projects, like the pigeon one, for example,’ says Dave. ‘There was the competition run by the film club, plus, at College, you’ve got all this free time on your hands and you’re surrounded by people with similar interests and are encouraged to give things a go. If it wasn’t for that environment, we probably wouldn’t have done any of this.’

The friends say that if they had to pin down the moment their filmmaking became more serious, it was when they created a documentary about Australia’s student migrant crisis, circa 2010. They each pitched in $300 to buy a camcorder off eBay, then set off overseas.

‘We had this really hack set-up, but got cheap tickets to India and decided to follow Indian students, trying to capture the entire process of applying to study abroad, to landing in Australia,’ says Louis. ‘We shot way too much stuff and didn’t know what we were doing, but when we came back to Australia, we had a side of the migration story that the mainstream media didn’t have – the student perspective.’

The resulting film, Convenient Education, was pitched to and accepted by SBS in 2012, which led to another project with the broadcaster. At that point, funding became involved, and this provided the impetus for setting up a business. Walking Fish Productions (named after two pet axolotls the boys had in their first share house out of College) was born, and the trio started exploring the stories of interesting people and topics that were ‘bizarre or intriguing’.

The next big break came when the guys and their partners moved to Japan for two years on a working holiday and used the time to make the documentary Big in Japan, which was picked up by Amazon Prime upon its 2018 release and screened on Qantas flights.

‘That’s when we got the confidence to get into corporate work and charge for our services,’ says Lachlan. In 2019 they quit their side hustles and went in full time.

Of course, running a full-time business with your best mates has its pros and cons.

‘I think the pros are that we trust each other and we know we can always rely on each other,’ says Louis. ‘But in the early years we were trying to figure out where we fit into the bigger picture. We all fell into it at the same time and none of us had any particular industryspecific skills, so it took us a while to work out what our strengths and weaknesses were. Now we comfortably have roles that we’ve assigned to each other and that’s helped us work more cohesively as a unit.’

As well as content for channels like VICE, The Guardian and Al Jazeera, the Walking Fish portfolio includes several videos created for Trinity College, which the team says are always enjoyable and bring back fond memories. ‘It’s always fun doing Trinity shoots because you get different perspectives of your own experience,’ says Louis.

‘Plus, the reality is, the production company wouldn’t exist without Trinity College … [Going to Trinity] is such a unique experience that not a lot of people get to have and we’re all very privileged to have had it. We’re very grateful.’