Al Baddock - History of Screen in Dunedin and Otago - Part One
At the November 2023 Southern Filmmakers Collective meeting, the main focus was on getting some insight from Al Baddock into the history and challenges that he's seen, through the ups and downs of the various networks of the Dunedin and Otago filmmaking industry.
AL: Good day, everyone. My name is Al Baddock. I've lived in Dunedin most of my life, but have traveled widely and worked in Asia, India, and Europe. Today, I work mostly as a producer, writer, script doctor, and screen production consultant, mainly for offshore productions. But just to give some context to the things I'm going to talk about, I thought I'd give you a bit more detailed background.
I came back to Dunedin in 1984 to work in television news. Since 1987, I've worked as a director, writer, producer, executive producer, script editor, script doctor, production and story consultant on screen productions for broadcasters and international networks, including National Geographic, Discovery, BBC, Channel NewsAsia, and various short films and New Zealand television shows.
So, I think what you're setting out to do with the Southern Filmmakers Collective is really important. I expect it can also seem pretty daunting and as if you're taking on the world with nothing in hand and a long, uncertain journey ahead. So, I hope the story I'm going to outline may help remove at least a little uncertainty and help ease the sense of going into an unknown world alone, which is easy to feel when you're setting out to build something like this. In fact, what lies ahead for the collective, I think, is fun, relatively easy, and success can come quite quickly, which is possibly not what you're feeling at the moment, but that's what I see.
I've always been a big believer that history tells us where we are and what path we're on. I'm a big fan of Owen Eastwood. I'm not sure how many people know him. He's a local lad who had some helpful things to say to people like the All Blacks and NATO about belonging to groups and how to make groups be the best they can be. I particularly like Owen's explanation that each of us has our time in the sun, but the sun is always moving. While the sun shines on us, we're guardians of what has been done by those who came into the sun before us and what we will leave for those who come into the sun after us. And this is our time in the sun.
Otago and Southland are complicated regions. On the one hand, we retain a stronger sense of community than is found in many Northern regions, but on the other hand, increasingly, we suffer the fate common to migrant communities: fragmented, individualised lives centred on self and lacking in unified direction. Everybody's chasing their own agenda, and a lot of what's going on in society around us encourages us to approach things that way. But it can make it challenging for a group like this to see the path ahead and what path to follow. And history tells us that we thrive most when we work together toward a shared vision and build on the work of those who have gone before. That shared vision is what you're building and why what you're doing is important. So, I'm hoping to fill in some detail of the foundation that sits beneath what you're doing.
For the past 20 years, I've been involved in promoting screen production at national and local levels. I served as the chair of the Short Film Otago Trust, which commissions locally produced short films. I've been president of the New Zealand Writers Guild. I was a South Island representative on The Writers Guild national board for many years. For a number of years, I served on the DCC Dunedin Film Advisory Group. I'm a founder member of Screen Dunedin, which was a filmmaking collective set up in 2005. I'm still a member of the permanent external advisory committee for the Otago Polytechnic film and communication course, and I was on the organising committee for the 2017 International Conference of Screenwriters Research Network at Otago University.
So, I thought I'd offer a potted history of the recent ancestry and history of collective screen endeavours in the South.
It's built from memory and sketchy notes and it doesn't capture everything or everyone so my apologies in advance for anyone or anything I've missed or misrepresented: it’s not intentional. This is just an attempt to put the current challenges facing the Screen sector in the south in a context and to give anyone who may not already be familiar, a sense of the work that's been done in the past that may be useful, or even inspiring, as you try to tackle the challenges ahead. Throughout the time I've been back in Dunedin there's always been an informal network, facilitating screen activity in Dunedin.
Dunedin has a history as the country's major television production base throughout the 1960s and 70s - with Play School, Spot On, Beauty and the Beast. A host of panel and magazine shows were continually pumped out, and there were historical drama series like Hunters Gold and Hanlon - a whole long list. The TVNZ production machine provided a focal point and training ground for screen practitioners across all fields, meaning that there was a fertile community of experienced screen practitioners here, historically.
By the time TVNZ withdrew from the city in 1990, Taylormade Productions, Natural History and Z had emerged from the state broadcaster to continue the legacy of local production and there were a host of other small production houses around town involving people who were accustomed to working with the best in the business and delivering to the highest standards. The number of jobs in the sector dropped considerably for quite a few years after TVNZ left, but those top level skills remained in the region. This gave us an inherent strength and that later became a weakness. For those of us who remained active here, we were pretty much all exTVNZ workmates and all former schoolmates and most things could be made to happen with a couple of phone calls. We all knew each other; we all owed each other; it was a community, but while that worked for that generation of practitioners, those local networks were not so accessible to new arrivals or new generations in the region.
Over time, activity became increasingly fragmented and siloed people didn't know where to go or who to talk to or where to get help for the things they were trying to work on. Then, in 2004, the Film Commission were touring a roadshow about new funding guidelines for big budget features. There was nobody working on big budget features in the south at the time, except possibly Glen Standring, Phil Davidson and Patrick Gillies were successfully working away at independent features on shoestring budgets. They were not about to qualify for the film commission's big budget initiative anytime soon. Robert Sarkies had followed the drift North after making Scarfies here in the 1990s, so it's not surprisingly people didn't find a big budget feature scheme terribly relevant to them, and the commission were talking about cancelling the Dunedin event because of lack of Interest.
However, after a conversation with Mike Riddell who was the New Zealand Writers Guild Southern Rep at the time, we decided that if a national organisation was offering something it couldn't be allowed to drop the South as uninterested. We knew if they stopped coming they'd never come back. So we set out to rattle some chains and we managed to get enough people to register to persuade the Film Commission to change their minds and come South. In the end the room was full, or near enough.
The Roadshow itself was of little actual value, but the Film Commission had a room full of people and had delivered on their national remit, and we'd sent a message that the South was still interested and still a player in the screen sector. The most important thing was that the Commission funded an aftermatch function at a local bar. There, a number of us got talking about what would actually be of use in the region and the consensus was that what we needed was to do things for ourselves, so a group of screen industry professionals and aspiring filmmakers came together to form Screen Dunedin. It was a no structure no budget no rules coalition of amateurs and film and television professionals simply working together to promote development of the filmmaking sector just to get things happening. So we decided that actually, what we really needed was to identify things for ourselves and make those things happen. I suspect it was a similar conversation to what went on before the Southern Filmmakers Collective happened.
We started meeting informally at the Duke of Wellington uh and the mantra was just “the South doing it for the South”. Within a month, Screen Dunedin had upwards of 30 members - actors, directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, set designers, techos, students, enthusiasts - and they were linked through an online Hub. Within the year that number had risen to 80 members.
Under Mike Riddell's leadership, Screen Dunedin had a website and was running small workshops. People shared skills, experience, equipment and advice on a no-cost / mutual help basis. Brett Mills from Queenstown Cameras attended that first meeting and, after listening to what was being proposed, announced that anyone mounting a production could have free use of his gear outside his busy season, and and things took off like a rocket. Mike Riddell moved North the following year and went on to write and direct his feature film Insatiable Moon but the momentum continued.
In the next few years, Screen Dunedin was instrumental on a host of initiatives. Members produced a number of short films, mostly produced without funding support from outside the region; many without support from outside the group. The first production - the short film Caketin - shot in 2006 was written by Bronwyn Tainui with rosemary Riddell as first-time director, veteran TVNZ DoP Paul Donovan and Mike Riddell as producer. Caketin went on to win Best Short Film at the international Moondance Festival in the USA in 2007.
Screen Dunedin short film Beautiful as we are was written and directed by Dell McLeod and was first runner up in an Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra's National film competition and picked up for screening on Rialto's Arts Channel. At that same initial Screen Dunedin gathering, Paul Donovan proposed bringing 48 Hour film competition to Dunedin and so that happened. 35 teams entered the first year and by its fourth year we were up to over 50 teams and comparable numbers to Northern centres. By 2009 Perry Jones’ animated short film Charlotte became the first animated film in the competition’s seven-year history to take home the grand prize and Charlotte was picked up for representation by the New Zealand Film Commission.
In 2005/ 2006 Screen Dunedin members were involved in producing the Table Drama series - low-cost half hour dramas for regional television, initiated by Richard Thomas and longtime Fortune Theatre stalwart Murray Hutchinson. That model was then taken nationwide and a similar series was adapted for Maori TV.
Screen Dunedin founding members Richard Thomas and Steven Downes established the Short Film Otago Trust with funding from the Community Trust of Otago and nurtured three short films by new filmmakers in 2007 and is still going, having since developed and funded more than 20 short films and provided production experience to hundreds of new entrants.
In 2007, having taken over for Mike Riddell as Writers Guild Southern Rep, I worked with Simon Marla from Script to Screen and the Writers Guild to stage a three-hour combined writers room, panel discussion and Date Night speed pitching session with local producers. It was, as far as I know, the first Dunedin craft event by a national screen organisation. The event showed there was support for such events in the South and the following year Simon and I expanded through a full day Festival of Filmcraft bringing together local and national experts to run film workshops and seminars, as well as networking sessions to connect producers with local writers and directors. The following year May 2008 Screen Dunedin worked with national screen industry organisations to expand on that small beginning and stage a full day Festival of Filmcraft, bringing together local and national experts to run film workshops. We had the film commission The Writers Guild, Script to Screen, Screen Directors Guild, SPADA, the DCC, Natural History NZ and attendees came from as far field as Invercargill, Queenstown and North Otago
By way of illustration of the gulf that existed between the local community and the national screen industry after the Film Commission's then Head of Development finished his outline of how to develop a feature film screenplay the first question he was asked was “What's the Film Commission?”
National screen organisations were simply unknown entities for most in the South.
The structure and operation of the sector was unknown.
The screen industry was something that happened up north and overseas.
This was a mark of how things had eroded in the South sinceTVNZ left the city in 1990, but the thirst and the energy was clearly there.
In March 2009 we expanded the Dunedin Festival of Film and Television Craft to two full days, and in 2010 we consolidated the event as a key element of the Southern film calendar. By then, the two-day Festival had become a mainstay of Dunedin's emerging profile as one of the country's most dynamic centres of the developing screen industry. Screen Dunedin and The Festival of Film and Television Craft was part of a a unique regional experiment that defied most conventions on what is required to establish a successful screen production base. There was no structure, there was no rules - it was pure altruism. The model was tested and proven over five years and in numerous arenas and manifestations.
Three things that I observed throughout that journey stand out. The first was the critical role of communication.
In March 2008 we held two meetings to gather feedback on what sort of things people wanted to help filmmaking in and around Dunedin. Attendees ranged from hobbyists and students to set designers and researchers and Film Festival directors and the usual coterie of writers, directors, producers and experimental film buffs. We had everything from teenage school students up as well as people from the Writers Guild, the DCC, Short Film Otago and various production companies.
Participants identified 13 specific wishes. Better communication, more workshops and opportunities to meet producers were top of the list. They may sound familiar to people who are looking at things today.
To be Continued.
