PROFILE: EAVESDROP PROJECT

: : Martin Thiele

: : printable version 

They say that film is the director’s medium and television the producer’s medium. However, it seems that new media art is regarded as an artist’s medium, even though it often involves similarly complex production processes. Having worked in all three, I’d have to say that, like film and television, producing new media art is bloody hard work. But unlike those media, when it comes to exhibiting the finished piece, the mechanisms for recognising the work of creative collaborators are largely non-existent.

I recently worked as producer on Eavesdrop – the world’s first panoramic, interactive, multi-linear narrative film – with artistic director of not yet it’s difficult David Pledger, and renowned pioneer of interactive and immersive cinema Jeffrey Shaw.

Eavesdrop is effectively a 9-minute film comprising six separate three-act vignettes stitched seamlessly together into a 360 degree panorama. Set in a nightclub, the film shows 10 characters endlessly playing out the moral dilemmas of the same 9 minutes of their lives. While the storylines are fixed and play out in real time, users/viewers can navigate their own paths through the material by panning and zooming across the stories using an interface located on a rotating platform. As one zooms in on a specific vignette, the vision is enlarged and that specific soundtrack becomes louder, simultaneously hushing the ambient sounds of the club and effectively allowing viewers to 'Eavesdrop' on the stories. In addition, the ten characters each have their own 'inner landscape', a short film that can be triggered by a close-up zoom function. These vary both stylistically and emblematically, functioning as filmic thought bubbles that require the viewer to do some work in making the links.

Eavesdrop involves a total screen time of 80 minutes and was shot on a 10 to 1 ratio. In other words it is comparable in length to a feature film and involved a similar production process involving a cast and crew of around forty people in areas such as production design, photography, sound, make-up, lighting and editing. Its creative hierarchy consisted of two principal artists and a producer, eight heads of department and their support crews, eleven actors and three musicians.
Initially it was to be shot using a 360° multi-lens camera that Jeffrey Shaw designed and built while at ZKM in Germany. For a number of reasons we were not able to use the camera, meaning that the original idea had to be reconfigured, and a different set of creative solutions found to a range of new technical, artistic and theatrical problems. For instance, the entire panorama could no longer be shot at the same time in the same location, making some aspects of the shooting easier, but bringing other problems involving simultaneity and seamless continuity between the 7 separately-filmed scenes. The photography crew of Michael Williams, Rocco Fasano and Greg Ferris, and the sound production crew of Lawrence Harvey and Steve Adam, in consultation with Torsten Belschner in Germany, worked with David, Jeffrey and myself as producer, to overcome numerous artistic and technical challenges.

Anyone who knows anything about production would understand that Eavesdrop would simply not have been possible for a crew of two people working on their own, and yet presenters, curators, writers and exhibitors continue to refer to David Pledger and Jeffrey Shaw as “the artists” as though this was the case. While their vision steered the work through an extraordinarily complex matrix of considerations, it simply would have been unrealisable without highly gifted collaborators. I think it’s important this is acknowledged if we are to see innovation in media arts in Australia encouraged and appropriately resourced in the future.

As in film and television, music and theatre, new media art is actually a collaborative phenomenon, and I believe it is both more respectful and more accurate to refer to David Pledger and Jeffrey Shaw as the principal creatives of Eavesdrop. Doing this also celebrates, as part of their artistic achievement, the fact that they selected and inspired an extraordinarily talented team of collaborators to achieve something truly remarkable.

Martin Thiele is a creative producer who has worked across visual art, media arts, film, television, community cultural development, festivals and most recently, theatre, as producer for Melbourne-based contemporary performance ensemble not yet it’s difficult. His most recent publication Engaging Art (2003) was nominated for an Australian Publishing Award.