Day One Shorts is a project aimed at mentoring aspiring young film makers through the various stages of a production. From conception, building a team, a narrative, to editing and final presentation.
In 2007, Connected Media Charitable Trust founder David Jacobs launched The Outlook for Someday, New Zealand’s sustainability film project for young people.
Beginning with an annual film challenge, the Someday Challenge, the project grew into a filmmaking workshop programme with mentorship opportunities, and Someday Stories, a funded, short filmmaking opportunity for emerging filmmakers across Aotearoa.
After seventeen years as The Outlook for Someday, the project has been reinvented and rebranded as Day One Hāpai te Haeata, a platform and learning hub for young filmmakers across Aotearoa.
The Someday Challenge and Someday Stories have become Day One Challenge and Day One Shorts and will continue to offer upskilling opportunities for young people wanting to explore impact storytelling on screen.
This year Day One Shorts presents eight productions. I spoke with three of the makers.
Yeah Pare
The movie blends animated graphics of video games pursuits with live action, shot at the physical level of the protagonists.
The opening shots are of ethnic Asian and Polynesian street foods which are great sensory stimuli for the eyes and taste buds.
Which the crew all partook in, says Rivera.
Three night markets were used. Botany, Mt Wellington and Henderson, with restrictions on time as the featured actors were mostly pre high school.
Rivera and Aumua worked the concept between themselves as they absorbed the diversity of culture that Auckland now represents.
Asian diaspora will soon overtake those who identify as Maori in numbers, and they are concentrated in Auckland.
Rivera is Filipino and pare means mate or friend in Tagalog.
The story is outlined as an odyssey as young lad JohnJohn is separated from his mother at the market, enters the fantasy gaming world in an endeavour to find her.
Numerous threats appear, including twin albino boys eerily reminiscent of the ghost twins in Kubrick’s The Shining.
There is a parallel to the cult classic The Warriors (1979), also an odyssey based on the ancient Greek legend of Anabasis, set amongst the street gangs of New York City. This country tends to ape America more than people care to admit.
The use of graphic novels and video games also comes from Scott Pilgrim Vs the World.
Location shooting was 4 hours at most in each venue. Editing is a more time-consuming process as each team found.
All these budding film makers have been given a baptism in the sheer size of the logistics needed to get to the final product
Taurewarewa
Which Libby Witheford-Smith became aware of in making her film. By the end of the process, she had become too immersed in her subject to say whether it was good or not.
She was looking forward to the opening night release and people’s reaction.
This is a documentary about bi-polar disorder, and most likely this was one reason for her loss of objectivity. There are three interviewees, and Libby is one of them.
All are young women who relate their experience through their teen years.
In ten minutes, Libby covers mental health issues which succinctly conveys a complex, multi-factorial subject and gets close to the heart of the matter.
I write this from long experience as a health professional. On the clinical front-line, and from helping friends and colleagues.
The stigma of mental health disorders is touched on. The honest revelations are more startling.
It can be the most interesting drug you have experienced. The euphoria at the peak is empowering to the point of uncontrollable sobbing, as Libby experienced at one point.
The crash comes as the dark matter of the universe submerging you.
President Nixon expressed it in one phrase, on leaving the White House for the last time after his Watergate indictment. Only when you have walked in the darkest valleys can you appreciate the joy of walking on the highest peaks.
Then there’s Beatle John Lennon. Once we were at the top, we didn’t know how to get down.
One insight from interviewee Dr Ruby Solly, whose PhD is around music therapy in a health setting. She imagines a helmet to give to people to experience the bi-polar brain.
So, you can know how it is to live in my head.
Detangling the Stigma
Jzayla Hughey has also made her personal story into a documentary.
Hughey is part Nigerian on her father’s side, and naturally had afro wiry hair. We know this, as her mother is featured, and she is white European.
There are home video shots of two little girls with distinctive hair prior to primary school.
To enter school, she needed to fit in. This was done by using harsh chemicals to straighten hair. A risk as these chemicals would burn.
This was the Motown look of the Sixties, as Berry Gordy carefully cultivated his Sound of Young America with the look that would appeal to the white population. Diana Ross and the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas all had straightened flowing locks.
This was before Hughey’s time, and it is bracing to discover that this female body ideal is still in play in contemporary times.
The other iconic Sixties production that Boomers like me would immediately relate to is the Broadway musical Hair, (no, not Hairspray). It became a world-wide phenomenon breaking the boundaries of Rock musicals, liberal politics, hippies and flower power, onstage nudity.
Most readily identified with the American Top Forty hit Aquarius/ Let the Sunshine In by the 5th Dimension.
Hughey regained her identity in her early twenties, when a film role was offered which required her to grow out her natural locks.
In this fashion her story connects with the older one of the celebrated Sixties. The pivot from 1967 to 1968. Flower Power, the Love Generation and Sgt Pepper collapsing into the assassinations of MLK and RFK, Black America burning, Democrat convention riots.
The iconic image is the raised Black Power fist framed by an afro.
The Rolling Stones sang an homage to Sweet Black Angel Angela Davies a little later. There is some resemblance to Hughey.
Dame Gaylene Preston (Ruby and Rata, Bread and Roses) was a story consultant.
All the other short films capture stories in special ways. All within the restrictive time frame of ten minutes.
Sua, A Portrait of a Bus Driver succinctly conveys a Samoan life from the village to the bigger Samoa of South Auckland.
Behind the White Wall. As spare and skeletal as a Murakami story. The immigrant experience (this time Korean) and the inter-generational connections, which is an ongoing evolution.
Lemons. India Fremaux has built a story around the phrase, if life deals you lemons, make lemonade. A young woman is estranged from her mother and needs to decide what she wants to do with her ashes.
Day One Shorts for 2024 has produced high quality films and speaks highly of the mentoring they have provided for budding young film makers.
Highly suggested viewing and they can be seen on the Day One Website, RNZ and Whakaata Maori.
Rev. Orange Peel