Susan Kerrigan
James Verdon
Abstract
The Filmmaking Research Network (FRN) project commenced in 2016, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with an aim to better define filmmaking research in the UK and Australian sectors, and to share information about how filmmaking researchers work. Activities to date include two workshops, conference panels and presentations, film screenings and an online survey collecting qualitative and statistical data about filmmaking researchers’ activities. This paper presents and discusses key survey results and provides details regarding the capacity of filmmaking research or, as it is often referred to in Australia, screen production research (Batty and Kerrigan).
The survey generated 168 responses from academics at 112 institutions across 24 countries. An overwhelming majority of respondents agreed that their filmmaking is a research activity, with two-thirds declaring that the status of filmmaking research inside their institution has improved over the past decade. More than half of the respondents were part of a peer network conducting research activities, including doctoral supervisions and examinations, and peer-reviewing of journals, books and funding body activities. Capacity and activity for post-graduate supervision was strong, with more than half of the respondents having supervised post-graduate students across their careers, including successful doctoral completions, and a third having examined more than five doctorates.
The survey also collected information about research films for a Film Register. There were 152 films submitted by 130 filmmakers. Notably, traditional research outputs were generated from 40% of these films and a clear majority of researchers submitted an accompanying research statement.
Survey data indicate that the sector is relatively small when compared to other creative disciplines although the quality of the research, as assessed by the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) assessment exercises in comparative fields, does achieve international standing. Although these results indicate that there are high-quality research activities being conducted in the sector, it is clear that more capacity is needed for both countries’ research excellence assessments. This paper interrogates these qualitative results to draw out detailed descriptions as to what can be learnt about the activities and capacity of the screen production sector operating within the academy. This qualitative information may also be useful to filmmaking researchers requiring evidence of the research field’s activities.
Keywords: filmmaking, filmmaking research, film genre, creative practice, film
Introduction
Filmmaking research is a developing area and films produced within the academy are growing in number. This research activity has emerged from artistic practices across video art and experimental filmmaking in addition to industry filmmaking traditions realised commercially through cinema, television and online publication. Filmmaking research investigates filmmaking traditions so that spaces between professional, artistic and critical filmmaking practices can be better described in terms of research methods, methodologies and research outputs. To gain deeper insights into the condition and dimensions of filmmaking as research, the Filmmaking Research Network (FRN) was established in 2016, supported by a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Drawing on the practices of filmmaking researchers predominantly in the UK and Australia, the network provided forums for online discussions, focus groups and conference presentations. These exchanges were framed with a specific focus on two questions. Firstly, how can filmmaking research be better understood? And secondly, how is filmmaking research measured in the academy and valued as research? It is worth noting here that the FRN project is framed with the term ‘filmmaking’ to avoid any conflation of the notion of film as a creative product with the practice of making a film or the reputation of the filmmaker (Kerrigan). Inside the academy, there is an additional qualifier of the filmmaker operating as researcher, therefore being able to articulate how new knowledge is generated through their filmmaking practice. In differentiating these various objects and people, there is an underlying assumption that “filmmaking is complex because it is drawing from both spectating and filmmaking as a united creative practice” (Kerrigan ‘The spectator in the film-maker’ 11), so precise uses of the terms ‘film’, ‘filmmaking’, ‘filmmaker’ and ‘researcher’ can adopt various meanings in regards to products, processes, practices and research.
The FRN began by connecting with filmmaking researchers through two peak disciplinary bodies, the Media Communication, Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) in the UK and the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) in Australia. It later connected with the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) based in the US. The FRN adopted a qualitative methodology and its initial activities occurred through two in-depth focus groups held in Australia and the UK. Throughout 2017, members were recruited through disciplinary bodies and social media threads, and others were encouraged to join the email discussion list administered via JISCMAIL. A steering committee[1] was formed comprising the investigators and five additional UK and Australian academics. This group provided feedback and direction on FRN activities, including the survey design, agreed definitions of terms that the FRN would use, focus group event structures, and discussion list topics. Another key FRN output is a set of four case studies written for researchers to appreciate filmmaking as a research discipline. The case study topics are: Film Research in REF Impact Case Studies, Researching Filmmaking Practice, Funding for Filmmaking Research and Assessment of Filmmaking as Research. Available on the FRN website, these case studies provide a synthesis of FRN research findings in this sphere. Traditional outputs designed to raise the profile of filmmaking research in the academy have included conference papers and two journal special issues. Each method of engagement has been designed to provide opportunities for network members to discuss, explore and promote different aspects of filmmaking research.
Invitations to participate in the online survey were distributed through the FRN email list and via social media notices. Survey participants were invited to be part of an Examiners’ Register and to submit their films to a Film Register so best-practice examples of filmmaking research could be identified. This paper will showcase some best-practice examples from the Film Register, focussing on the accompanying research statement and how it may be used more effectively as a tool to evidence and describe filmmaking research.
Conducting the Filmmaking Research Survey
The international online survey was deployed over four months in 2017 and contained two parts. The first was centred on filmmaking as research and contained 17 questions concerning activities including past professional practices, academic peer-reviewing, PhD supervision and examination, preferred research methodologies, university support for filmmaking as research, and an invitation to participate in the Examiners’ Register. Responses to the first part of the survey were de-identified. The second section of the survey was the Film Register in which survey participants provided information about films they had made as research. There were 26 questions that included essential information about films including synopses, taglines, genres, durations, budgets, release dates and reference URLs. A further four questions were asked about the research components of each film, including the research statement, the discipline where the research was located, and the number of traditional publications resulting from the film or its making.
Filmmaking Research Survey Findings
The FRN survey received 168 responses from 24 countries and 112 institutions. The majority of responses were from the UK (63%) followed by Australia (17%) and the US (9%). An overwhelming majority of respondents (85%) reported that they considered their filmmaking activity to be research, and the majority of respondents (66%) declared that the status of filmmaking research inside their institution has improved over the past decade. This change to the status of filmmaking research is reflected in the types of support provided by each institution. The majority of respondents (69%) reported that internal research funding and dedicated film equipment was available for their filmmaking research activities. The majority of respondents had access to studio facilities and technical support (65%), and almost half received administrative support (48%).
Table 1
Institutional Support for Filmmaking Research
| ‘Yes’ University Supports | ‘No’ Not Supported | N/A | |
| Internal research funding | 69% | 25% | 6% |
| Administrative support | 48% | 44% | 8% |
| Dedicated film equipment | 69% | 25% | 5% |
| Studio facilities | 65% | 24% | 12% |
| Technical support | 65% | 26% | 10% |
The gender balance of academic filmmakers is an improvement on broader industry metrics but still more identify as male (57%) than female (43%). The majority of survey participants had worked in either the film or television industry or both (75%), which suggests many filmmaking academics are in touch with industry practices (see figure 1), although 14% of respondents did not identify with any industry sector. These respondents are possibly academics who may not have had professional industry experience as filmmakers. A smaller portion of respondents (6%) said they had worked elsewhere and provided the names of other sectors including: third sector, NGOs, policy, museums, education, film festivals, journalism, curation, software company and arts institutions.
Of all survey participants, just over half were active peer-reviewers (58%), with the majority of these reviewing for journals (55%), conferences (35%) and internal university review panels (33%), followed by research council membership (18%). In terms of peer-review contributions, the organisations supported for the longest time were industry awards (21%), with more than half of these respondents (13%) being jury panel members for a decade or longer. The least supported peer-review organisations were arts councils (5%).
Figure 1. Academic Professional Expertise
There was substantial activity in the post-graduate research space, with participants overseeing the awarding of nearly 300 doctorates throughout their collective careers.
More than half of the respondents were currently supervising post-graduate students (61%), which includes doctorates, Masters by research and coursework. Historically, post-graduate supervision was undertaken by more than half of the respondents (54%), who provided doctoral completion totals as per figure 2.
Figure 2. Doctoral Completions
Survey participants were supervising equal numbers of PhD theses and PhD creative practice supervisions (n=71, 68%) with a quarter (n=27, 26%) supervising DCA/PhD professional doctorates. A majority had examined post-graduate work including Masters (69%), PhD (54%) with DCA/professional doctorate examinations being the lowest reported at 10%. A third of the respondents regard themselves as experienced doctoral examiners who have examined multiple theses or creative work PhDs. Exceptional cases were noted, where one supervisor supervised 16 post-graduate awards to completion and six others supervised 7–12 completions. Participation in the Examiners’ Register was very high (91%), with documentary filmmaking (n=119) being the most popular area of expertise, followed by fiction filmmaking (n=81) and directing (n=81). Expertise in producing (n=47), digital media (n=46), screenwriting (n=44), editing (n=43) and cinematography (n=37) was noted. Animation (n=5) received the lowest number of responses from these respondents.
Figure 3. Research Enquiry First Preferences
Respondents were asked to rank terms used to describe their research enquiry (see figure 3). There were nine discipline-specific options listed that were commonly used by the FRN Steering Committee to describe qualitative or practice research approaches to filmmaking.
The most popular research descriptor (40%) was ‘Practice as Research’ (Nelson 9), followed by ‘Practice-led research’ (Candy) and ‘Practice-based research’ (Candy) receiving equal status (15%). ‘Film and Cinema Studies’ was next (13%), followed by the emerging Australian-based methodology ‘Screen Production Research’. Notably, there were only 5% of respondents who did not respond to this question.
‘Practice as Research’ was a popular term among UK respondents, with ‘Practice-led research’ and ‘Practice-based research’ sharing favour with both UK and Australian respondents. ‘Film and Cinema Studies’ was ranked fourth and was the first preference across the widest range of countries, led by the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, India and Kenya. However, a large portion of respondents (58%) did not select it at all.
‘Screen Production Research’ and ‘Ethnography or Auto-Ethnography’ were equally ranked in fifth place (8%). ‘Ethnography or Auto-Ethnography’ was recorded by more UK respondents, whereas ‘Screen Production Research’ had an equal number of responses from the UK and Australia, with one each from the US and Ireland. ‘Reflective Practice’ received the lowest ranking (3%), below ‘Action Research’ (4%).
The preferences listed for types of research enquiries indicate that filmmaking research can be described through both qualitative and creative practice research paradigms. Film Theory and Cinema Studies projects often employ qualitative research methods to provide evidence of how films impact the wider world, focussing frequently on a critical appraisal or audience reception of a film. Practice research methods have emerged naturally from these qualitative techniques, allowing filmmakers to research what they do from their position inside the filmmaking process. Research into artistic practice is often a singular pursuit across many areas of practice. It provides an alternative pathway into filmmaking research and is one that captures a subjective insider’s view of practice (Kerrigan and Callaghan). Exactly how these types of research enquiries are intertwined becomes more apparent when looking at the information provided to the Film Register discussed below.
The Film Register Data
There were 198 films submitted to the Film Register, with 152 of these providing full details. The films were made by 130 filmmakers, some of who provided multiple entries and others worked in teams. There were 111 films made since 2011 and three films were anticipated for release in 2018. There were 23 films made between 2002 and 2010, while one film was made in 1996 and another in 1984.
Although most filmmakers provided complete details about their films as non-traditional research outputs, 46 filmmakers did not provide fundamental information such as a synopsis or research statement. There were 28 films submitted without research statements, and some of these films were made prior to research statements being required by national research councils. Of the 198 films submitted, more than half (60%) provided information about subsequent traditional research outputs, which is discussed below. There were 80 films without any associated traditional research outputs and 34 filmmakers did not provide research statements for their films but entered all other data. A number of researchers indicated that a statement would likely be written in the future.
Of the films with completed detail, 96 were from the UK, 40 from Australia, five from the US, three from China, two from Canada, one from the UK and Chile combined, and one each from Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Zimbabwe.
Detailed research-related information was provided for 118 films that generated 703 traditional research outputs, including nine books and 34 theses, with 74 book chapters, 228 journal articles and 358 conferences, including proceedings.
Figure 4. REF/ERA Traditional Research Outputs from Films
There were 311 ERA and REF eligible traditional research outcomes, giving each film a traditional research ratio of 2.5 to 1 (see figure 4). This means that on average, the completion of each film is linked to more than double its output in traditional research forms.[2]
As expected, films that were submitted to the Register varied in genre and length. The most popular genre nominated was documentary (59%) followed by fiction (16%), with the remaining films (22%) spanning animation, experimental, video installation, docudrama, hybrid, multi-camera and television series. Short film, being 2–20 minutes in length, was the most reported (39%), followed by half hour (22–30 minutes, 21%), feature length (70 or more minutes, 20%) and hour-long films (35–67 minutes, 18%) (see figure 5).
Figure 5. Length of Films Submitted to Film Register
Researchers completing the survey nominated that they worked in multiple crew roles in the 152 films that were submitted to the Film Register. There were six filmmakers undertaking all crew roles for their films and at the opposite end of the spectrum, seven who undertook only one crew role. A significant portion of respondents (38%) combined three or four crew roles, typically producer/writer/director/editor or producer/writer/director. A breakdown of the roles nominated yields 117 producers, 71 screenwriters, 136 directors, 67 cinematographers, 12 art directors (production designers) and 82 editors (see figure 6). Other roles listed include executive producer, sound recordist, educational coordinator, fundraiser, interaction designer, first A. D., visual effects producer, script editor and a favourite, “pressing record button-er”!
Figure 6. Researcher Crew Roles on Film Register films
The categories of crew roles assumed by the filmmaker researchers are indicative of the budgets for these research films. Of Australian submissions, five films were funded through external sources with budgets ranging from A$500,000 to A$150,000. Following this there were five with budgets between A$25,000 to A$100,000, seven films with budgets between A$11,000 and A$25,000 and 15 films completed with budgets below A$10,000. In Australia, universities were nominated as supporting filmmaking research, with A$40,000 cash being the largest university contribution to a film’s budget. There were nine other Australian universities providing between A$15,000 and A$20,000 for film budgets. Another 10 universities provided between A$2000 to A$5000. Crowd funding, patronage and personal loans were the most commonly listed ‘other’ sources of income.
In the UK, there were 40 films wholly funded from external sources and four films made with budgets between A$900,000 (£500,000) and A$180,000 (£100,000). There were 15 films with budgets between A$45,000 (£25,000) and A$135,000 (£75,000). There were 12 films with budgets between A$18,000 (£10,000) and A$45,000 (£25,000) and 60 films with budgets ranging around A$18,000 (£10,000). The largest source of external funding was from an American Charitable Foundation and approximately A$58,000 (£32,000) was the largest funding figure from a university. A number of films listed in-kind support for colour grading, equipment and mentorship.
There were four commercially made films from the UK whose budgets have been excluded from the survey data because their funding sources could not be meaningfully compared to films made inside the academy. One of those films, One for the Road, a feature-length comedy, was funded by the UK Film Council with a budget of £500,000. The other two films, The Knife that Killed Me and Macbeth, had budgets of £2.8 million and £2 million respectively and reflected contributions from John Mateer researching his professional practice in visual effects (Mateer).
There were 19 films that did not list any budget and it has been assumed that no funds were sourced to make these films, with two declaring they did not receive any university support. Of those two films, one was 18 minutes and the other six minutes in duration. Of the 16 no-budget films, the majority were short experimental films, and only two longer films were submitted: a 37-minute documentary and a 35-minute experimental film. There was one animation and one fiction film in this category.
Figure 7. Film Distributors for Film Register
Nearly half of the films did not list a film distributor (47%, n=68). Of the films that did, 16% were commercially distributed and 30% were self-distributed (see figure 7). Commercial distributors included Universal Pictures UK, Television Broadcasters (ABC TV, CBC), Ronin Film, National Educational Television Association, Lionsgate, Fairfax Digital Media, Creative England, Kanopy, and Tartan Films. Arrangements for self-distribution of films were made usually by the filmmaker’s institution, using available platforms such as Vimeo, YouTube or though the filmmakers’ production companies.
The survey did not ask filmmakers to describe the impact their films had on audiences but it did ask for a list of prizes, nominations or film festival screenings. Just over one-third of the films (35%, n=53) won prizes or awards at film festivals, including the AHRC Film Awards. Some films won multiple prizes at international film festivals and filmmaking awards, including Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG) winning Baxter and Me by Gillian Leahy and Joanna Callaghan’s Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida, winner of the Best Practice Portfolio 2016 for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies. A film selected to screen at over 40 festivals that won four awards is Persisting Dreams by Côme Ledésert. This work is a 25-minute animated documentary in Italian. The text accompanying the submission to the Film Register reads “Toni is a fisherman in Lampedusa. Through his testimony, intercut by animation that take him on a journey as forced witness, this documentary invites us to question our perception of migrants in Europe – between our tenacious fantasies, Toni’s reality and the persisting dreams of migrants”. The filmmaker is credited with multiple roles of producer/director/cinematographer/editor. Persisting Dreams had a relatively small budget of £1500 and has not to date generated any peer-reviewed traditional publications.
Another example of a film that has performed well with award and festival recognition isWoman with an Editing Bench by Dr Karen Pearlman. The film won the 2017 Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) award, the Australian Screen Editors Guild Award (ASE) for Best Editing in a Short Film, Grand Jury Awards: Best Short, Honorable Mention at Dances with Films 2017, Best Editing at Scruffy City Film & Music Festival 2017, and a Silver Remi Award for Historical Short Productions at the WorldFest Houston Film Festival. Pearlman has produced a number of traditional research outputs that stem directly from this film and her related research in film editing and cognition (Lambert and Pearlman, “Editing (for) Elizaveta”; Pearlman “Editing and Cognition”, “Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition”). Pearlman subsequently authored a book chapter, “A Cognitive Approach to Documentary Film” (2018), and a journal article, “Editing and cognition beyond continuity” (2017), examining the editor’s creation of expressive forms in film that “require artistry of a higher order, rather than following the relatively straightforward rules of continuity cutting, and may have distinctive affective or cognitive impact on audiences” (Pearlman, “Editing and cognition beyond continuity” 67). Pearlman is editing a special issue of the journal Apparatus: Film, Media, and Digital Culture in Central and Eastern Europe titled “Revealing the Invisible: Women and Editing in Central and Eastern European Film”, whichwill be published in late 2018 and focus on Russian editors. Pearlman’s research offers a best-practice example that illustrates how a film can contribute to a body of ongoing research about filmmaking practice and also increase traditional research outputs relying on that creative work.
Orchids: My Intersex Adventure is another Australian film as research output that has generated significant traditional research outcomes (Hart, “Orchids, intersex and the auto/biography”, “Writing characters with intersex”) and won film festival and industry awards.[3] The hour-long film follows documentary filmmaker Phoebe Hart as she “comes clean on her journey of self-discovery to embrace her future and reconcile the past shame and family secrecy surrounding her intersex condition” (Hart, IMDB.com). Hart was awarded ‘Best Direction in a Documentary (Stand Alone)’ at the 2012 Australian Directors Guild (ADG) Awards for the film. Produced and distributed by Hartflicker Moving Pictures, it had a budget of A$170,000) and received development and production funding from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Screen Australia, Screen Queensland and Queensland University of Technology. Orchids: My Intersex Adventure was created using a practice-led research approach in which performative, auto/biographical filmmaking led to research insights about the filmmaker’s personal truth and her lived experience as someone with an intersex condition. The film was shot with digital cameras by a small crew of intersex community insiders. Hart argues that by having a small ‘insider’ crew, the ‘talent’ was more inclined to openly express issues that may have been long shrouded in secrecy and stigma (Hart, “Orchids, intersex and the auto/biographical project” 79–91). This created a transformative research context that empowered the sharing of stories between the filmmakers working behind the scenes and on-camera participants. Critical theory and dialogic/dialectic methodologies were used to take the filmmaking research into feminist and queer theory paradigms. The intertwining of the more traditional qualitative and practice research methodologies shows the interdisciplinary nature of filmmaking research. The film stands out among many in the Register as a best-practice exemplar because it has received industry acclaim by winning awards and being commercially distributed and it has also led to 18 scholarly outputs, including a PhD thesis, three book chapters, five journal articles and nine conference proceedings.
Film Research Statements
The research statement is one mechanism used by ERA and REF to articulate filmmaking research practice. Three-quarters (113) of the films entered into the Film Register provided research statements, and nine filmmakers submitted the film synopsis as a research statement and 15 filmmakers did not provide a statement for their film. Of those without a statement, one film was made prior to statements being required and another was made in Belgium, where statements are not required. Research statements submitted were of widely varying quality, with some representing very sophisticated articulations while others were significantly underdeveloped. The axiological nature of this analysis highlights the emerging status of the field and its desire to investigate complex practices, and also highlights the valuable research being conducted through filmmaking. Common weaknesses and inconsistencies evident in the FRN survey research statements echo REF2014 assessors’ comments regarding the need to improve the narrative and evidence that supports filmmaking research claims (REF Subpanel 36, 111). Many of the statements do not adhere to ERA or REF templates, sometimes making it difficult to assess those films’ contributions to research through this mechanism.
In Australia, the ERA research statement supports a maximum of 2000 characters comprised of three sections—Research Background, Research Contribution and Research Significance. In the UK, the REF Research Statement consists of three sections titled Originality, Rigour and Significance. Examples illustrating differences in REF and ERA research statements can be found in Appendix 1. These statements are presented as indicative examples of UK and Australian research films and statements from 2014 and it is acknowledged that examples of best-practice exemplars have shifted due to subsequent REF and ERA rounds.
The UK REF research statement in Appendix 1 is from Kayla Parker’s dance film Heaven is a Place. Parker worked with other academics and Plymouth community members to make this film, which has been screened at 16 film festivals, led to a book chapter output and uses a practice as research approach focussed on screenwriting and directing.
The example of an Australian ERA research statement is from First Person Kodachrome (2014), an essay film created by filmmaker Dr Andrew Taylor from University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and broadcast on ABC TV. Taylor employed a practice-led research approach and undertook multiple crew roles of producer, screenwriter, director, cinematographer and editor. The film had a budget of A$20,000 and funds were raised externally with Taylor’s academic wage cross-subsidising its production. To date there have not been any traditional research outputs linked to this film.
Further improving the quality of research statements is essential for filmmaking research to make headway. It may seem simpler for factual films, such as documentaries, to provide evidence of the research through a statement, primarily because documentary can be used to frame new understandings of cultural and social topics that are more visibly offering new knowledge. However, other genres such as fiction or experimental film also need to master this requirement and articulate the value of their embodied research for others. Research statements are a key mechanism for describing filmmaking research and the widely varying quality of statements submitted to the FRN Survey highlights an area where significant improvements can be made to allow filmmaking research to be better recognised and valued within and outside of the academy.
What is Filmmaking Research?
Two foundational research questions drove the FRN project: how is a research experience made through practice? And how does the making of a project in this field answer a research question?
As an accompaniment to the film, the research statement is a key mechanism to help describe research conducted through practice and how the filmmaking answers a carefully posed research question. The FRN Survey findings show that research statements could more effectively improve descriptions of the research practice that accompanies films as non-traditional research outputs. Well-written research statements that describe how research is achieved through practice, framed by methodologies and methods, will help clarify where the research resides within each filmmaking project. Better articulating how ‘practice’ methods are used in filmmaking will help the sector move beyond a tendency towards generic applications of practice methodologies. Strategies to construct and apply domain-specific methodologies are as relevant to filmmaking research as they are to the broader creative arts (Smith and Dean). Information regarding exactly how and when the research was conducted in making the film needs to be included in the research statements. Questions need to be posed by filmmaking researchers and answered through their research statements to clarify where the research occurred because this may not be evident within the film. For example, “Was it a collaboration with a community to write a screenplay?” or was the ‘post-production phase’ the place where the new contribution to research was achieved? Did audience research occur after the film was completed?
The FRN Survey findings illustrate holistically the activities and capacities of filmmaking that is conducted as research, however the quality of the research being conducted lacks consistency and convincing overall coherence. Work among academic peers needs to be undertaken to improve this, and in many cases the number and quality of screenings and prizes awarded to a film need to be specifically framed in terms of esteem for those honours as contributing to the film’s research contribution by universities and national research bodies. REF and ERA impact agendas require qualitative and quantitative evidence to demonstrate impact. Dissemination of a film in the public realm and a recount of a film’s community impact or professional esteem can then be valuable in demonstrating how a film as research output influences community behaviour.
A significant number of the Film Register submissions were of a high calibre because they clearly demonstrated, through related traditional and non-traditional research outputs, how the film or filmmaking was a research activity and an output. Alternatively, more than half (53%) of the films submitted to the Register had no additional research outputs. Although some of these films may in future generate further traditional research outputs, others may not. This indeed raises the complexities around describing filmmaking practice as research and suggests that if filmmaking academics are to be more broadly recognised for their non-traditional research contributions, then how each filmmaking research project contributes to the field needs to be further articulated.
Filmmaking researchers can improve the language that describes their research contributions by consistently and rigorously employing creative practice research methodologies (Batty and Kerrigan; Kerrigan and Callaghan). Practice research methodologies can accommodate claims that research begins in the early stages of the filmmaking process and thus allow researchers to evidence their research in terms of practice, as was the case for Orchids: My Intersex Adventure. Creative practice research methodologies allow for the exploration of novel filmmaking processes such as narrative creation, which allows research participants to be co-owners and co-collaborators in the film. Both Orchids: My Intersex Adventure and Baxter and Me demonstrate how filmmaking as research is evidenced through the filmmaking and within the filmic output. These best-practice exemplars present models that can be replicated despite the content of the films being bespoke. Over time, these and future creative practice research outputs will be able to be grouped together to illustrate bands of knowledge generated for academic peers to appreciate research being conducted through filmmaking.
Filmmaking research and specific methods undertaken in it will often be invisible to much of a film’s audience. It is important that filmmakers researching their own practices and processes are able to clearly articulate what they are pursuing and to then describe the outcomes of that research activity. As Gibson argues, “the work we do as filmmakers in the academy is pre-eminently the work of knowledge production rather than the work of film production” (Gibson vi). Sharing between the industry and the academy measures of quality regarding non-traditional research outputs that are films does not mean that these are the only measures of research success or quality.
Clearer articulations as to the type of research and how it was conducted, and distinctions between the film as a research output and the broader research project to which the film may contribute are required. It is sometimes assumed that a film as the outcome of research is where the contribution lies but this may not always be the case. Improving descriptions as to how and where the research is located will assist filmmaking research and its practitioners to more clearly identify the value and contributions made by filmmaking research.
Conclusion
Filmmaking research can be better defined by harnessing a cohesive and committed community of researchers to review the value and quality of research being conducted in the field. The FRN Survey demonstrates that such a community exists, with active peer-review occurring and researchers contributing to practices that better describe and demonstrate the value of filmmaking research. A demand for research methodologies that are more than just descriptors and articulate how the research is designed and executed through filmmaking practice is essential. Those who study ‘practice’ methods have argued that it may eventually be necessary to move beyond a broad approach to practice methodologies and create “domain-specific methodologies” (Smith and Dean). The alternative is that a broader range of methodological definitions about practice becomes redundant, or worse, much of the important work already recognised as research is undermined. The FRN provides an opportunity for these discussions to occur and promotes refinements and clarifications as to how filmmaking researchers describe and conduct practice research through shared and unique methodologies and methods. Despite the long lead times for filmmaking research impact, the nature of the medium and its established ability to connect often with wide audiences mean that the impact agendas set by REF and ERA exercises in the UK and Australia can be seized as opportunities to improve the profile of filmmaking research. Further examination is needed of how research relationships that connect filmmaking considered as both practice and process with film as a form of non-traditional research output. This can be achieved partly through a more detailed examination of the relationships between films and filmmaking researchers, that is, relationships between creative products and creative practice researchers.
[1] See filmmakingresearch.net/participants/
[2] ERA and REF traditional research outputs include books, book chapters, journal articles and refereed conference proceedings but it was not possible to reliably confirm which conference presentations resulted in published conference proceedings. Conference outcomes have therefore been excluded from the results.
[3] Awards for Orchids: My Intersex Adventure include Best Documentary (General) at the 2010 ATOM Awards and Best Film by Popular Vote at the 2010 Brisbane International Film Festival. It has received 21 other awards for best documentary at numerous international film festivals.
Works Cited
Batty, Craig, and Susan Kerrigan. Screen Production Research: Creative Practice as a Mode of Inquiry, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Candy, Linda, and Ernest Edmonds. “The Role of the Artefact and Frameworks for Practice-based Research.” The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts. Edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2011, pp. 120-138.
Callaghan,Joanna, director. Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida, Heraclitus Pictures, 2015.
Gibson, Ross. “Forward: Cognitive Two-Steps.” In Screen Production Research: Creative Practice as a Mode of Inquiry. Edited by Craig Batty and Susan Kerrigan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. v-xiii.
Hart, Phoebe. “Orchids, intersex and the auto/biographical project.” Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013, pp. 79-91.
Hart, Phoebe. “Writing characters with intersex variations for television.” Journal of Screenwriting, vol. 7, no. 2, 2016, pp. 207-223.
Hart, Phoebe, director. Orchids: My Intersex Adventure, Hartflicker Moving Pictures, 2010.
Kerrigan, Susan. “The spectator in the film-maker: re-framing filmology through creative film-making practices.” Journal of Media Practice, vol. 17, no. 2-3, 2016, pp. 186-198.
Kerrigan, Susan. “Filmmaking as Creative Practice: Assessing Creative Magnitude and Scale.” Global Media Journal: Australian Edition, vol. 10, 2017, pp. 1-11.
Kerrigan, Susan, and Joanna Callaghan. “The filmmakers’ research perspectives: an overview of Australian and UK filmmaking research.” ASPERA Annual Conference 2016: Screen Production Research: The Big Questions, July 2016, http://www.aspera.org.au/research/the-filmmakers-research-perspectives-an-overview-of-australian-and-uk-filmmaking-research/
Lambert, Anthony, and Karen Pearlman. “Editing (for) Elizaveta: talking Svilova, Vertov and ‘responsive creativity’ with Karen Pearlman.” Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 11, no. 3, 2017, pp. 157-160. doi.org/10.1080/17503175.2017.1407063.
Leahy, Gillian, director. Baxter and Me, Gecko Films,2016.
Ledésert,Côme, director. Persisting Dreams, aug & ohr medien, 2015.
Macbeth. Directed by Kit Monkman, GSP Studios International, 2018.
Mateer, John. “A fistful of dollars or the sting? Considering academic–industry collaborations in the production of feature films.” Journal of Media Practice and Education, vol. 19, no. 2, 2018, pp. 139-158. doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2018.1464715
Nelson, Robin. Practice as Research in the Arts, Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
One for the Road. Directed by Chris Cooke, Palisades Tartan, 2004.
Parker, Kayla, director. Heaven is a Place, Sundog Media, 2014.
Pearlman,Karen, director. Woman with an Editing Bench, Ronin Films, 2017.
Pearlman, Karen. “Editing and cognition beyond continuity.” Projections, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, doi.org/10.3167/proj.2017.110205
Pearlman, Karen. “Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition.” In A Cognitive Approach to Documentary Film. Edited by Catalin Brylla and Mette Kramer, Palgrave Macmillan, (in-press) 2018.
REF2014. 2015. “REF Research Excellence Framework 2014: Overview Report by Main Panel D and Sub-panels 27 to 36”. Accessed March 25, 2018. www.ref.ac.uk/2014/media/ref/content/expanel/member/Main%20Panel%20D%20overview%20report.pdf.
Smith, Hazel, and Roger Dean. Practice-led Research and Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Taylor, Andrew, director. First Person Kodachrome, 2014.
The Knife that Killed Me. Directed by Kit Monkman and Marcus Romer, Universal Pictures, 2014.
APPENDIX ONE: RESEARCH STATEMENTS
These two research statements represent examples of current practice from 2014, and it is acknowledged that best practice exemplars may have shifted due to the UK’s REF and Australia’s ERA rounds since then.
Example 1, REF: Short Dance Film – Heaven is a Place (2014)
Filmmaker: Kayla Parker
Professor Dr Roberta Mock: executive producer and co-screenwriter
Ruth Way: choreographer and co-screenwriter
Dr Clare Finburgh and Professor Carl Lavery: academic consultants (Jean Genet)
Heaven is a Place Film Short Synopsis: Experimental dance film inspired by the writings of Jean Genet, made in Plymouth, southwest Britain, with members of the LGBTQIA community, whose personal narratives of longing and loss are told through a series of poetic encounters in the liminal, waterfront spaces of the city’s border with the sea.
REF statement
1. Originality
A dance film made with members of the LGBT community in Plymouth. Part of an EU-funded cultural project called Heaven on Earth? (with partners in Greece, Spain and Turkey), the overarching purpose was to creatively interrogate the contemporary legacy and relevance of the French writer, playwright, filmmaker and activist Jean Genet.
Somatic movement workshops, building on Sondra Fraleigh’s techniques and philosophy, co-organized with LGBTQIA advocacy organisation, Pride in Plymouth, prepared participants to perform in the film. The workshops identified and explored themes and movement vocabularies evoking the oppositional interplay of Genet’s work to be expressed through choreographic processes on site.
2. Rigour
Central to the film’s practice-research methodology was the creation of an entwined process of filmmaking and choreography based on site-responsive physical improvisation and the development of scenarios and movement scores reflecting personal memories and queer histories of specific places. As discussed in a chapter for a book entitled Community Filmmaking: Diversity, Practice and Places (Mock et al. 2017), by focusing on a movement-based performance for moving image, the film explores how the process-driven triangulation of thinking bodies, sexual subjectivities and emplacement enables the acknowledgement, consolidation and re-imagination of a community erased or marginalised in dominant accounts of its city.
3. Significance
Informed by perspectives of Edward Relph and Rosi Braidotti, by using reflexive locatedness as guiding principle, and developing a strategy that understands ‘publicness’ as a form of embodied creativity and world-making, Heaven is a Place models how community film might celebrate and extend diversity through constructing a collectively shared counter-public cartography.
The film premiered at two public engagement symposia in June 2014, in Greece and in Plymouth. It was also screened that year during Plymouth’s first Pride parade, and subsequently within practice-as-research events as well as dance film, community and experimental film festivals (in Canada, Poland, Germany, USA and Italy).
* IMPORTANT NOTE: The above research statement is for the practice output Heaven is a Place (2014) as a collaborative endeavour, supported by the community filmmaking chapter co-authored with Roberta Mock and Ruth Way. For REF 2021, we are submitting in different Units of Assessment and the final form of the contextualising statement will represent the project’s research dimensions as practitioner-researchers, both separately and together. Please also note the Statement of Collaboration, which is included in the free text box: “We consider this to be a fully collaborative output, in which we took equal responsibility for the methodological direction and final shape. This is reflected in the shared ‘screenplay’ credit”
Dr Kayla Parker, November 2018.
Example 2, ERA: Half-hour documentary – First Person Kodachrome (2014)
Filmmaker: Andrew Taylor
First Person Kodachrome Synopsis: In 2004, the last of the Kodak slide carousels rolled off the production line and a few years later Kodak stopped manufacturing Kodachrome, the ‘classic’ slide-film emulsion it developed 70 years earlier. These endings marked the death of the photo-chemical slide show as a popular medium. First Person Kodachrome is an obituary of a dead media form. It is a personal history and idiosyncratic investigation of the slide show’s influence, legacy and after-glow. It looks at Kodachrome through the lens of the filmmaker’s slide collection and his own life and work as a filmmaker/photographer.
Despite its deep resonance in both post-war and contemporary culture, there have been virtually no commentaries on the slide show in general; and its intersection with art/photography/cinema, in particular. First Person Kodachrome is an evocative film essay that speaks to this gap in knowledge.
Research Statement
Research Background
First Person Kodachrome is an essay film in the research fields of cinema studies; art history; and biography/memory studies.
In 2004, the last of the Kodak slide carousels rolled off the production line and a few years later Kodak stopped manufacturing its ‘classic’ slide-film, Kodachrome. These endings marked the death of the slide show as a popular medium.
Marker’s ground-breaking La Jetée (1962) showed that it was possible to make a film (almost) entirely from still images. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) and Tracy Moffatt’s series Something More (1989), demonstrate cinema’s influence on photography. Sadness (1999), based on William Yang’s slideshow monologue of the same title, uses the slide show as a structuring device. First Person Kodachrome takes a more personal and directly biographical approach than the above-mentioned works. It looks at Kodachrome and slide shows through the lens of my family’s slide collection and my own life and work as a filmmaker and photographer. The question underpinning this research is: Why is it relevant or interesting to look at this ‘dead media’ form and how does the form resonate in contemporary culture?
Research contribution
Despite its deep resonance in both post-war and contemporary culture, there have been virtually no commentaries on the slide show in general; and its intersection with art/photography/cinema, in particular. First Person Kodachrome speaks to this gap in knowledge. The film demonstrates that changing uses of Kodachrome and the slide show – through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – informed contemporary aesthetics, especially the ‘turn’ towards autobiographical art and first-person documentary filmmaking.
Research significance
First Person Kodachrome was commissioned by ABC Arts and screened nationally in November 2014 on ABC1 to over 200,000 viewers (and another 50,000 viewers using ‘catch-up’). There was a repeat screening in 2015.
First Person Kodachrome also screened at the Sightlines Conference at RMIT in November, 2014. The audience included leading Screen academics from Australia and overseas. The reception to both the TV and conference screening has been overwhelmingly positive. Following these screenings there have been requests to screen the film in university teaching in Australia and the UK.
Paper acknowledgement:
This research was supported by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Network Grant as part of the Filmmaking Research Network (FRN) project, 2016-2019.
Biographies
Susan Kerrigan, University of Newcastle, is a screen production scholar who specialises in creative practice research methodologies. She is a co-investigator on the FRN grant, funded by the AHRC, and has held an Australian Research Council grant investigating the creative industries. Susan has professionally produced and directed Australian television programs, including Play School.
James Verdon is an Associate Professor at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, where he is Department Chair of Film and Animation. James is also President of the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA). James’s research is concerned with relationships between screen reality and other realities, particularly as mediated and differentiated through technologies of representation. It takes a broadly materialist approach and is realised through a combination of screen-based outcomes and more traditional publishing.