Workshop Participants
Janine Boreland is a filmmaker who has worked throughout Australia and is based in the most isolated city in the world, Perth, Western Australia. As well as working extensively in television production in both documentary and drama, Janine specialises in collaboratively producing media content with communities.
Janine has founded a number of large-scale community film ventures including; Indigenous Community Stories working with Indigenous Australians to record heritage, culture and history for future generations as well as creating invaluable records of Australia’s national cultural identity; the Lost Generation Project about a group of people with intellectual disabilities who have been institutionalised for most of their lives, and have little or no connection to their community; and the Making Movies Roadshow which trains people living in regional areas to express themselves through film.
Janine has also worked in regional Australia as a Producer for the ABC (Australia Broadcasting Corporation) in the ABC Open project creating local multi-platform content, and engaging audiences in creating user generated content (UCG) for distribution across all ABC platforms.
Janine’s independent body of film work has been broadcast in Australia on ABC 1, SBS, Message Stick program, George Negus Tonight, as well as on QANTAS in-flight entertainment and various festivals including Flickerfest, St Kilda Film Festival, Revelation, Black Screen, Message Stick Film Festival (at the Sydney Opera House), The Dreaming Film Festival, Waverock Weekender, Margaret River Film Festival, Heart of Gold Film festival, CineFest Oz, Art Gallery of NSW, at the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) and at NFSA Black Screen, ImagineNATIVE film festival.
Janine participated in the November 2011 MediaStorm Storytelling Workshop. She had the following to say about her experience:
I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop. There was a sense of belonging, and being a part of something really exciting. I will be using the narrative skills learnt in this workshop in my future work.
The workshop was a vortex of time. MediaStorm had warned us about this prior. There were late nights, team members started to resemble POW’s getting cat-naps on the edit room floor, there were belly laughs and dummy spits. Yep, just how it is when you make a good film.
There was a great sense of collaboration working with the MediaStorm Producers on our piece. The entire process was taken very seriously, and we literally hit the ground running, but with constant support, dialogue and guidance. Thank you Brian, Tim, Rick, Caitlyn and Bruce for all your support, and I hope there may be some way to collaborate in the future.
It is a unique experience in that you are not hypothetically going through the motions of making a film – you are really doing it. Amidst the normal stresses of being in production, the Producers were also teaching us. They were continually patient, clear with information and suggestions, pushing us to make the best film possible, yet were considerate and made sure that we were enjoying the process also.
The strongest learnings that I have taken from the workshop are MediaStorm’s athletic-style commitment to narrative, and their point of difference – always being of the highest production quality. What good are pretty images when the story is flawed? It is the story and always the story that comes first and foremost. Their method of building a narrative is disciplined, followed in specific stages and is an arduous process of elimination. It is the secret in the sauce, and I found it equally painful and very satisfying going through the process.