Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2016

The documentary film 600 Mills was explicitly funded and produced as an academic research project, designed to investigate, through cinematic means, the decline of the textile industry in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. Drawing on the work of Thrift, Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi and others, it is argued that the film production process uses ‘affect’ as a form of sensory knowing that can engage with relevant theory and be used to conceive of film-making as a valid form of academic research. This article discusses the approach taken by three film-maker researchers in making a film that, instead of using the medium to convey information or communicate research findings gathered through other means, seeks to use the creative possibilities of film production to convey knowledge about a complex human, social and historical process.

In an era of digital film-making it is possible to include many different narratives, images, video and audio recordings into the screenplay. It becomes a multimodal form that is not limited by words perfectly formatted on a printed page. Now that audiences are reaching for more portable and accessible screens, it could be time for film-makers to use these devices during the script development stage. Through the use of digital technologies, the screen practitioner is able to develop, write and view the proposed story on many different screens. It is a new practice that I have adopted as a Ph.D. candidate for my feature film screenplay in development. In this article, I will explore the stages I have taken as a writer-director who has embraced multiple ways of writing and developing the screenplay on various screens. Through a creative and critical approach, I propose that a paperless screenplay has the potential to expand the possibilities of script development and invites the reader to share the experience of the story as it unfolds on the screen.

Media practitioners find themselves in contradictory times. Smartphones that are able to capture highresolution sound and image are facilitating a consistent, abiding and thoughtful practice so that media production is more affordable and ready-at-hand than ever before. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated software is being developed to automate what have previously been considered skilled tasks, such as editing, curating and colour grading. While still an emerging field, these incursions have the potential to pose serious threats to the creative agency of individual moving image-makers. From a first-person practitioner perspective, this article considers how the creative agency of a critically engaged moving-image practice is both enabled and threatened by smartphone production environments. Using the lens of cinécriture, I consider how the full range of production choices becomes part of the expressive tool kit and the importance of making these aspects of creative agency conscious. I argue for the value of conceptual engagement through practice so that the act of participation and making is emphasized, and the significance of human creativity is maintained. Through an examination of the Google Photo Assistant application as an example of a basic automated editing tool, and setting my own approach to moving-image practice in this context, I put forward the case that greater digital literacy is required if practitioners are to maintain satisfactory levels of creative agency.

Although there are accepted distinctions between the practices of still and motion photography, a historical investigation into how these art forms pictorially write corroborates shared technologies and techniques, and confirms a common inversion of practices adopted in more traditional forms of text-based writing. The article focuses on nineteenth-century photographic practices as a site within which particular strands of photography and other related image-making exhibit a burgeoning awareness of cinematography, through the use of multiple and sequenced images in single works. These practices reveal certain conditions for writing on the screen and illuminate choices and foci that practitioners held at this time. The use of novel representational technologies is coupled with a fixation on scribing perceptual photorealism during this heady era of invention. This drive creates a sustained emphasis on apprehension and experience at the expense of image materiality, an overlooked indicator of the true nature of reality written on-screen.

Noirscapes is a transmedia experience, and the cameras are rolling. Writing its own version of Los Angeles’ history, Noirscapes is a filmed scholarly discourse that literally drives through the urban environment of the city of Los Angeles constructing a noir historiography. The authors of this article are film-makerresearchers who, as a mode of creative practice research, are using screens and the medium of film to write with, on and for the screen. The premise of Noirscapes is that film noir can function partly as a surrogate history of Los Angeles, so that film noir screens provide written cinematic evidence of the city’s actual as well as imagined history. Noirscapes presents a series of short films that constitute a creative practice research output. Filming and driving across the freeways and boulevards of present day Los Angeles allowed the film-makers to traverse production locations and to discuss their role in urban historiography, as featured through iconic film noirs like Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Chinatown (1974). Noirscapes demonstrates how film-making and spectatorship can be used as complementary research methods that enquire with, on and for the screen.

This article traces a connection between the literary essay and the audio-visual installation in order to consider how a spatialization of the essay can create the conditions for affective experience. The composition of the audio-visual installation can condition an environment for an embodied pensiveness where the moving image and sound act as conduits towards affective transformation. I discuss essayistic architectures in relation to poetic structures and ways in which both, through their play of associations, can access spaces where language cannot articulate fully. I use as a case study my audio-visual installation, Straying, to discuss how this approach was particularly useful in exploring the relationship between body and environment, the making and unmaking of the self in relation to the places we inhabit. The space of the installation is a transformative and transformational space, where the audience and work make and unmake one another through meandering of thought/body instigated by the dynamics between image, screen, space and sound.

This article explores the development of corporeal themes in a screenplay by analysing the initial developmental stages of a feature film tentatively titled Fireflies as case study. In early 2015 I decided that I wanted to write a screenplay about two teenage girls’ experiences of negotiating social media and dating apps such as Tinder. In doing so I hoped to explore notions of intimacy and bodily control. My practicebased screenwriting research in this area is concerned with the way that recording observations of the female form on video and in still images can inform the representation of female agency and sexuality in a screenplay. In particular, I draw upon the approach of Virginia Pitts, who used video recordings from actor workshops to assist in the development of a short film script. This approach is underpinned by the theoretical concept of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ as a means to form connections between writer, actors and audience. Using a reflexive methodology to mediate the screenplay development process, I respond to scripting workshops that involved two female actors, undertaken to interrogate the themes of the screenplay. These workshops involved the use of mobile phones and video cameras to record footage of bodies, which was reviewed to inform the writing of the first draft script. I examine a range of literature that presents case studies of innovate ways to ‘screen write the body’, before applying various approaches in the early development of Fireflies. Key points include a consideration of character presence and movement rather than psychology as a focus of the film narrative; and the use of screens (mobile phone and video) to write for the screen.

Script development is a creative, commercial and social process in which ideas, emotions, people and personalities combine, cohere, clash and are contested by the practicalities, policies and rapid movements of the screen industry. It is an activity often controlled by hierarchical and financial powers, yet experienced by individual and usually sensitive practitioners trying to tell their stories to an outside world. Script development is a highly exciting yet potentially very daunting aspect of screen production and in recent times has crept into the university, with academics and academics-in-training developing screenplays for research projects and degrees. In this article we discuss and provide examples of the academy as a site for researchbased script development, an activity that draws on creative practice research methodologies to find ways of conceiving and executing screenwriting differently. By taking away the commercial constraints of the industry and instead incubating ideas in a research environment, we consider the potential of the screenwriter to use the academy as a space in which their practice can be broadened, deepened, expanded and experimented with. While this practice might sit outside of the industry while in process, we see its results as having the future potential to be used in – or at least valued by – that very industry. As creators, writers, storyliners and script editors of a range of screen works across a range of industry settings, we draw here on our collective screenwriting practice experiences within the academy to focus on the notion of thinking through the screenplay – using research to underpin creative practice, resulting in what we might call an ‘academic screenplay’ – as a way of writing differently for the screen.