 I'm a panel here. We have a really diverse and eclectic mix of people and I'll let them introduce themselves in a second, but just really quickly Bench on the end here. Young, innovative, creative photographer, videographer, editor who came into my life about five years ago. We're sitting in a shared space in Auckland called the Biz Dojo. Bench was doing a transmedia project for Social Impact and has done a bunch of cool stuff since then. So I'm looking forward to hearing from him. And we have Annie, a wealth of experience in film and documentary specifically editing coming at a different angle. And Billy, Billy here, Billy and I have been friends for 26 years. He was the cool guy who came to New Zealand, a small town where I was living called Hamilton from Canada. Turned up with a Canadian accent, everyone thought he was American. He became the cool guy, used to chew gum, we didn't even really have gum and played basketball and ended up coaching my basketball team. He's since lived in lots of countries around the world and really coming at this from how do you communicate across cultures as an English teacher? How do you use language in order to craft a story that really connects across generations? So I'll leave it at that and let the panel introduce themselves and then we'll take it from there. Kia ora whanau. My name is Benjamin Brooking. I hail from Auckland. I was born in Wellington in this beautiful city. I spent most of my time on the West Coast. And have really been doing the media thing for the entirety of my short career. How I got into the social change side of media has been... Well, it's just been opportunity after opportunity that has come to me and I feel very blessed. And I'm very blessed to be here in the surroundings with all of you lovely people. Kia ora for your involvement and Kia ora for the kai. That was beautiful. Whoever was responsible for lunch today. Thank you so much. My story is quite a short one. I went through university not really knowing what I wanted to do. I was in media strictly because I didn't really know what I wanted to do and it's quite a broad landscape that you can go into. And I thought I wanted to be in advertising and I really chased that for a while until a mentor and teacher of mine sat me down and said I could be doing so much more and I thought what else can I do? I just want to chase dollar signs and have some fun. But I was hired out of university to work in the space with Rebecca in the Visdojo in a transmedia experiment of a documentary company working for a social change in Auckland and internationally. And that really springboarded the sorts of projects that I would find much more fascinating than you could put any kind of dollar signs on. Since then I was involved in youth education. I was hired to research an educational series around engaging youth in what they can do with their futures. Following that I started working with a couple of companies who specialize in content for not-for-profits and for government funded but social civil society-led promotional campaigns. Most recently around bigging up the LGBTI community in Auckland and in schools up and down the country so that people can have a wider understanding of what individual peoples like the LGBTI community go through so that we can work together to make sure that people don't have to suffer what previous generations have suffered. So my statement this morning was marama. Marama is the Māori way for understanding. I'm all about teaching understanding and gaining through it. Thank you. Kia ora, thank you. Kia ora everybody. My name is Annie Collins. I'm an independent film editor and this year is the 40th year that I've been doing this. I'm also... I think I'm probably the first independently trained editor in New Zealand as well. I haven't come through television or the National Film Unit or one of the big companies, anything like that. I didn't start out to be a film editor. I had been travelling. I came back to New Zealand. I went to the design school because it was the only place in Wellington where I could do life drawing on a really, really regular basis. I wasn't any good at designing at all. I don't think. And did a bit of film work in the last year and at the end of the year when I graduated, that particular part-time tutor came to me and said, Annie, what do you think you're going to do when you leave? And I said, I don't know, Pat, bloody awful designer. And he said, why don't you try editing? Because I'd been the one who had edited our little film. And I said, OK, no probes. And I said, how do I start? He says, oh well, go off and see whether you can get trained somewhere. So I went round the usual places and nobody wanted to know me. And I went back to him and said, oh Pat, nobody wants to know me. So what can you suggest? And he said, well if you can keep yourself alive, I'll train you. Because he was setting up the first independent editing service in New Zealand. And that's what we did. And about a year and a half later, a very fine editor called Ian John came through Wellington looking for a person who could help out on one of the new wave of New Zealand films. This film was called Sleeping Dogs. And with a director called Donaldson. And Pat said, oh Annie, you can do that. I never had, of course, but you know what New Zealanders are like. So off I went to Auckland and things just kept rolling like that. And so I worked for some really fine people in the industry, many of them now dead. But the most seminal experience I had came in those first three years. And that was, I was suggested as an editor for a whole bunch of footage that had been shot in 1981 on an event that occurred in this country called the Springbok Tour. And the director of that was a woman called Merata Mitter. And she is possibly one of the finest of New Zealand's documentary makers. And we spent a year on that film. And she trained my thinking and my approach to my work because I'm Pakeha and Merata was bicultural being Māori and having to live and operate in the Pakeha world. And I learnt pretty early on that my skills were adequate but my attitude was not. And so that it was a fairly early knocking into shape. And after that all of the work that I have done in this country has been with that grounding that that one particular woman gave me sitting on one word and the word is called Kopapa. And we'll go into that a little bit later. It's great to be here today. It's funny that Rebecca gives me such a nice introduction about playing basketball together those many years ago. Not that I'm a very good basketball player at all. I'm not sure how I had the position of being able to coach for their team. So to come to an event like this I'm actually very humbled to be sitting up on this stage because from the people I've talked to so far there's some minds in here just humming with power and with experience in media and also storytelling. So to be up here on stage to talk about it is really it's fantastic to be here. So just a brief history about me is I don't sound like a New Zealander. Obviously you probably picked that up this broad-scooping Canadian accent but with the many years in high school here and also a little bit of university I've never seemed to be able to kick it out and my vowels have become longer and my hours have become harder as I progress to my life and I've just been resigned to it although many Kiwis will say oh so how long you've been here for mate? It's like well you know I've been here for many years now I guess if there's a term maybe a kiniwi would be the right thing but the fact is I'm probably not really from anywhere at this stage. My home is where I put my head down most times and that's Cambridge right now. Over the past years I've lived in Hong Kong and Germany and stints here and there and I've been exposed to many different cultures and because of those stints and those different cultures and teaching I've somehow become obsessed with photography and videography and that came to a head when we myself and my family went back to New Zealand and I ran into Rebecca and I said you know Rebecca I really like to do the video thing and she said why don't you just do it and I think it's probably like when you hear about mentors or something like that you don't really go and say to someone like Ben Ben if you'd be my mentor and say sure Billy that'll happen but Rebecca's been that to me where she said come on Billy just give me a little bit of a shove and said come and do this and try it out so yeah that's where I'm at right now I'm a videographer so to speak a storyteller and hopefully we can talk a little bit about how culture affects the truth and how videography can help us get our stories out there So just thought start with a question maybe for you Benj in your intro there was an area I'm particularly interested in and I know that you've got some good thoughts which touched on some of the issues that were raised this morning in the discussion which is around how do you connect people and tip them over the boundary from engagement to action and some of the greatest challenges that we're facing in the world I know that one of the key issues that resonates with you particularly from a youth perspective is climate change you're a representative of New Zealand youth in climate change negotiations which she also didn't mention in his very humble intro and just wondering through those experiences of seeing what's happening in the world your perceptions of where we need to go with some of these large issues in order to create and change the world needs how do you see that video and film, trans media can be a tool and in what ways Excellent I could talk about climate change all day I was fortunate enough to be taken along with an independent research NGO to the latest climate change negotiations which were in Lima this December just passed and forming the youth delegation there I was fortunate enough to be the main media representation on the panel we had a broad range of people student doctors new engineers activists all sorts but I got to really take it on from a media perspective and I think that the the best way to see something happen from a video prospectivist to know your outcome before going into a project and for us the outcome is well it's good to encourage people to make personal changes to their lives we know that that just doesn't happen on a mass scale with something like a video clip being put on YouTube what we're trying to do is accomplish understanding that's our biggest goal with the climate change movement what we need to create is a real hunger for political change and the understanding that backs that so when political change happens people are there to push it along and to accept it and to know why it's the right choice to make so we try to make content which will allow people to join the dots for me a good example for me is I'm sure all of you here detest plastic bags we don't need plastic bags anymore they're well and truly archaic however there's been no nothing in politics to get rid of them as soon as it happens there's going to be a tremendous groundswell of support people are going to understand why plastic bags have to go because there's been so much campaigning around why they're horrible if people didn't understand why plastic bags had to go they would fight it because they just can't agree with something that they can't click with so what we're trying to do is make join those dots for people with very interactive messages where they can get behind what's important to them through human connection through video and really understand the story for themselves and how it impacts them and I think in order to do that you would need to understand the complexity of the system and a lot around human psychology in order to think about ways that could trigger that presumably absolutely knowing what people want is most of the battle once you once you understand your own outcome and you can kind of work backwards from there you do need to apply this psychology around what people will share for youth I'm really working on youth here that's what I'm working on youth love to be able to appropriate a message youth really respond to things that other youth create you can't really make a message and put it out there and expect people to share it to take it on so much that they're willing to attach themselves to it and to even click something like share on Facebook they need to know that that's going to align with their own brand speak that's going to align with their own personal brand that's going to thoroughly represent them the best way that I find to do that is to have youth creating content for youth because youth innately know what other youth will like and share and that's why the most popular videos on YouTube and Vimeo are ones that are youth made and often appropriated from sources that you don't expect remixes are remixes the most popular content cool and a good tip maybe get a perspective from the other end of the spectrum of how we can look at complex systems and use knowledge about how to navigate through those complex systems in order to create content which is meaningful and doing that in a really careful way and I just had some reflections from our earlier discussion any around the approach that you'd like to take to filmmaking and editing and you said two words to me that you're all about Coke, Papa and Chaos and the balance between the two and I'm really intrigued by that and just wondering if you could share with people here a little bit around your approach picking up from you Benj and the psychology and knowing youth to youth et cetera there are two questions that I have for directors when they walk into my cutting room and the first one is what is your co-papa which and the word in very simple terms means what is your purpose for making this film and in what spirit do you approach it and you cannot use the word co-papa if you are not thinking spirit as well the second question that I ask them is who are you talking to and I often get this eerie-fairy reply going oh we're going to be talking to the whole world or we're going to be talking to all New Zealanders and I sit there with a very jaundiced eye going oh yeah you tell me who are you talking to just who is it and the other one the other sort of reply that I often get for the co-papa is oh well we've got this wonderful idea and we really like to do this and this and this and in fact the answer is about page long and I go to them when you get that down to about this length then you come back to me because you don't know what you're making this film for so you've got to have those things really really clear having sort of said that the other word is that business of chaos I read a book on well I read most of a book on chaos theory and I thought gosh this sounds like me and it's really interesting you can go into a project going I want to do this so you go out and you make yourself a list of what you need to shoot and you make yourself a list of who you want to talk to and then you go out and shoot the stuff and you shoot all the cutaways that you're going to need and you get the interviews and you go back and do your transcriptions or if you're going to do that or whatever and and then you get out your paper and you go there's this bit about this and there's this bit about this and there's this bit about this and we'll start with that shot and then we'll finish with that one and we'll have all these bits in between and it'll all go from there to there and it'll have a sense on paper I don't know how many of those I've thrown in the waste paper bin I never approach a film that way because I don't know what's in that footage and of course I don't know what's in it I never shot it but the important thing is is that often the director doesn't know what's in that footage either and they won't know if you just follow that those paper directions those sorted out directions that you had right at the beginning that somebody had figured out before they even went out to shoot I cut a film last year came out in the festival called Ngareo Te Fenua, The Voices of the Land and the director came with all this beautiful footage and one particular thing he said, ah don't worry about that that was the day that we were meant to go up in the chopper over and it was bad weather and the chopper didn't work and so we had to take Richard and nuns and we'd all sit in this motel room for all day and it was as boring as anything we just shot a bit of stuff but we'd shot it all elsewhere anyway and it was just rubbish he said don't bother about it okay so when I let him back into the cutting room the first thing I showed him I'll just go a bit further back from that I don't actually let the director into the cutting room with me when I first look at that footage because what does the director say when the shots come up they say yeah they say oh that's rubbish and they say oh now now what happened oh you'll never believe what happened when we did that shot oh it was so cold it was so hot it was it took so long and I'm going just go away because what they think about the footage is not what I think about it because I'd carry none of that baggage with me nothing my eyes are clean and so I look at all the material I'll log it all those will take weeks and then I do my first cut and I cut this particular sequence that this director thought was rubbish and I thought oh well and then I called him in after I'd done all this work and he came in I said oh we need to start looking at all these sequences and I'll put this one up first and I put it up and there was this dead silence beside me because what was up on screen was actually the essence of the central character who was bored and impatient and cracking jokes it was him and that's what happens when you keep things in chaos I don't know what the first shot of that film is going to be I don't know what the last shot is going to be I don't even know how everything is going to happen right through it and I work a process that keeps that footage unlocked at least two thirds of the way now that particular film took four or five months to cut it's not until we get right down to about the fourth month that I can say okay I can feel the shape now and keeping it in chaos means keeping the creativity running when the creativity is running you can feel the energy sounds like you'd be good at sustainability strategy just reflections a lot of what you're talking about is with sustainability strategy you've got to put a whole lot of bunch of information into a central pot where you get a holistic picture find out the pathways and then pull them out in a creative way so it's really cool just one real quick question of Billy then we're going to have a discussion we're wanting to keep time Billy as far as a lot of this discussion is getting to the essence of the story is when we get to the essence of the story things are a lot more powerful we're able to connect with the audience but also the issue that we may be wanting to get to the final race so just wondering if you've got any really quick thoughts on that before we take it to the floor for reflections I think what I don't know I take it from my own personal point of view I have a very short attention span and I think essentially what we want to see on a video or even when we have a conversation or when someone tells us a story is to hear the truth and also humanity and I think that perhaps a danger and many of these videos that are online that isn't done fast enough from the outset I think that that truth can come in many forms whether that's a voice over or something that you see in fact my mind starts racing today I think it's the anniversary of the earthquake in Wellington in Christchurch and I can't help but think of a conversation I had with a friend of mine who has parents that live down there and they're out in front of their in front of their house and they're taking pictures I think they're selling their house I'm not sure if it was damaged or something like that Dylan you know Dylan anyways he's taking a picture in front of this house and a car comes screaming by and says and someone screamed out the window disaster tourists you know and for Dylan who's just kind of helping out his friends there or his parents there to take a picture of the house someone had taken a completely different meaning of what he was doing he's doing real estate or he's doing an insurance claim or something like that and this other person obviously from having lived in the area the took a different viewpoint on it and I think in video we have to search for those different viewpoints from people and it takes a bit of time to scratch below the surface there's a really nice video on that topic done by Zoe McIntosh about the post what happened in Christchurch afterwards and in the opening scene we have these helicopters sweeping down looking at very serious damage to Christchurch and the first sentence that you hear as a voice over is Christchurch earthquakes were the best thing that ever happened to me and I think wow what's going to happen in this video and as you continue to go through the video you see a series of street people whose lives have completely changed but for the better because they have now places to live in very fancy houses that have been condemned or in very fancy hotels so highly recommend seeing that but I think when you can hit the truth in humanity in video it's a very powerful thing and just for those who don't know Christchurch earthquake 161 people lost their lives in New Zealand so a really significant impact on New Zealand landscape so now we're just going to from Christchurch isn't it the stone so the disaster relief for Christchurch was coordinated from the stone and I think that's really quite fitting and touching that today is the anniversary of the earthquake and here we are so thank you for mentioning that Bill so just wanting to take some minutes some time for reflections now either reflections on storytelling for positive impact or filmmaking use of short form video either reflections of what we've said or just personal reflections from the day thank you I have a challenge right now and I'm going to ask all of you if somebody said to you you don't need to spend time making videos Marianne don't waste your time or your money making videos just you know the information's there just send the information to people and then they'll take action they'll change their behaviour or they'll engage or they'll what would your response to that person be like what do you think is the particular power of video or film as a medium for motivating engaging and shifting people video is amazing I don't think any of us are going to disagree with that YouTube has exploded other platforms are doing just as well I would say to that person nothing illustrates the human touch of what we're doing quite like video does on the scale that video can because we can't go person to person explaining what we want to explain to every single person on earth but video can get us almost there it's the best thing we have at the moment and text and sound won't quite do it I personally hate making well I don't make videos these days that that shouldn't be videos infographic videos are not my favourite you need to have the right purpose behind what you're making as long as that's lined up then video is amazing mind blowing my question is for Annie first Annie I just really love the shoes and the way that's working with the scarf and everything solid the socks you got it going on Annie dig it so you've been doing this for 40 years and I'm just so intrigued by your story and I'm just curious what you think of this idea of short form video and the modern way that we watch films and storytelling online and through YouTube clips and as you've been telling stories for this many years what do you think of this short way and as Bill mentioned our short attention span and the fact that we have to bang out a story five minute YouTube clips yeah boy it's a good question because I mean I often go on YouTube and have a look at things and man the clips that are not well crafted I'm going who's the next one down on the list and I flip over basically I think that short form is a beautiful crafted skill to get ideas across in such a short time and it's to do with the pacing of the concepts that you're dealing with I'm not talking about the pacing of the pictures necessarily because a lot of people think ah got to get something across in a minute chop chop chop chop miss the idea miss the concept say that the crafting of one idea into another into another it's a threading it's a weaving that's the skill that I really respect and if you can deal with concepts in that short time across then the power of that and this is answering your question too is just so much greater than a lump of written material I don't read stuff well I just can't man but pictures yeah I have a question for you as well Annie you talked about the emerging properties of chaos and some of the principles of having purpose and spirit well defined and articulated I'm wondering if you have any frameworks that you can share around kind of team models and team configurations especially as it relates to making a great documentary and particularly why I'm asking is I'm really interested in this notion of what it would look like to work with a team of people and and put together a documentary and but having zero experience in it just kind of wondering what advice you would have around how the ideal team formation might look and with a blank canvas not necessarily fitting within some conventional set of norms and roles it's that word co-papa if your co-papa is clear it's truthful it has no ego inside it then everything every decision that you make or member of your crew makes is bounces off that co-papa and if it comes back and it goes oh it's fearing off down there what were we actually on about it gets pulled back again so the setting of the co-papa right at the front of a production before you get the camera out before you start contacting people to set the co-papa to check it out with the people that you need to check it out with it'll be your mentors or the people who are involved in that stuff whatever your subject is whatever you want to make it about that work is done before hand that's what I learned off Meritimita co-papa and she would check out she had elders that she would go to and they would come by old men, old woman they'd come into the cutting room and they'd just sit in their watch and I'd be sitting at the back of the room going I wonder what's going on in their heads because they didn't look like they were they didn't cry and they didn't laugh and they just watched but at the end they would feed back to her and I was not present at that feedback they would feed back to her whether she was on co-papa or she was not so that's why I talk about that and I think whether it's short or it's long, doesn't matter co-papa is clear, you're fine Cole, thank you thanks for that I wanted to have a short musical interlude to energise us as Yosef will introduce the next speaker