Rachel Landers

A Net of Invisible Things : The ‘unseen’ scripting practices of internationally acclaimed VR creative Lynette Wallworth in Collisions and Awavena.

University of Technology Sydney, Australia

The telling of first nation screen stories by outsiders presents a complex set of challenges. This presentation maps the ‘invisible’ scripting practices of Australian VR creative Lynette Wallworth with reference to Collisions (2016) made with the Martu community of Western Australia and Awavena (2018), made in partnership with the Yawanawa people of Brazil. Both works won the Emmy Award, in 2017 and 2020, for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary. Concurrent with the rise of recent innovative VR work such as Wallworth’s, there has been an acknowledgement that the conventions of text based ‘screen development’ may be problematic for grasping the processes by which such works were forged.

In Screenwriting in a Digital Era (2014) Millard confronted the limitations of Western centric, and commercialised scripting practices as failing to capture the diverse array of approaches to generating stories for the screen. However, even these critiques and explorations are still connected to the idea that however distinct these development processes are, there are still artefacts produced that are critical ‘scripting’ building blocks or ‘underwriting’ (Dooley 2017) to create a finished screen work. The presentation frames ‘screenwriting’ for VR as problematic because it fails to capture the critical early interactions between the parties and the dance of understanding, listening and trust which, for Wallworth, must be in place for the story to be offered and received. Then offered to the audience as a ‘gift’ or ‘transmission’ (Munro 2018). This ‘joint approach’ moves the work from the ‘feeling of being there’ to the perspectives of those who actually ‘are there’. Of key significance is the question whether Wallworth’s discoveries at the frontiers of new technologies could be transmuted back to traditional forms of documentary/drama ‘scripting’ and offer clues to challenge the ‘”straightjacket” of mainstream screenwriting’ (Ross and Munt, 2018) and funding and introduce innovative strategies for inclusive filmmaking.

Professor Rachel Landers is a filmmaker with a PhD in history. Her films have screened all over the world and won a number of prestigious awards. In 2011/12 she received the NSW Premier’s History Fellowship and was appointed Head of Documentary at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. In 2018 she was appointed head of Media Arts and Production and Animation Production at UTS. She is currently working on several film projects Her feature film A Dog and Her Boy is in development with support from Screen Australia, Film Victoria and Screen West and making animated science hybrid documentaries for children The Wonderful, Fluorescent, Massive World of Tiny, Invisible Things. In 2023 she published Hybrid Documentary and Beyond for Routledge She also received a Powerhouse research fellowship in 2023 for her hybrid documentary work.