Stories of Research

Can you collaborate with 9 PhD researchers and produce 9 short films that show their research in an accessible and engaging way; with no budget, and no sound person?

And by the way it’s a competition and you have got 4 weeks to do it …

I expect a lot of people would just say no.

To survive as a creative freelancer I think you have to have an optimistic view of how the world works – otherwise you would never say yes in the first place. You have to believe fully in the vision that you have or you will never be motivated to try and achieve it.

I said yes because I felt that it was an opportunity to practice and explore, and shine a light on something that has only ever been dimly lit before.

The process

Finding the stories was a conversation or series of conversations in which I prompted the researchers to comb through their experiences to find something that was uniquely theirs. Initially, I encouraged them to think broadly:

What does this research mean to you?
What is the reason that you are doing this, as opposed to something else?
What, when, where was the moment you that ignited your interest?
In what ways are your experiences meaningful to other people?

Then we looked for resonant moments we could narrow in on: where change had occurred. This gave us the basic external plot:

something happened to someone

The tricky part was persuading them that the story also needed an internal plot, about their (or someone else’s) thoughts and emotions. Some kind of intimacy that we could not know about, unless they chose to tell us.

It was not easy for this group to allow the lines between their academic and personal lives to blur. I wanted them to share and be in touch with their humanity, so often a secondary consideration for academics.

One of the lecturers I know refers to her PhD students as ‘the robots’.

Here are some of the films we came up with:

Reflections

Claire Mitchell on working with Alys

Scott Midson: My experience of making a short film with Alys

David Husskison make a short film

Vision

Did it achieve the vision that I had imagined in the first place?

I think that there are moments of real beauty and vision in each of the films, and that is thanks to the researchers, who were able to open themselves up and allowed me to push them into emotive territory. This did result in a particular kind of story, probably one that I am particularly fond of.

If there had been more time I would have liked to have been more collaborative in my approach and ceded more power to the participants in choosing what form of story they wanted to tell.

I am still in the process of mulling this over.