Re-creating the artefact: producing a living digital archive for the VCA film school.

© 2021 Donna LyonThis practice-led creative research project tells the story of how the author went about producing a digital archive platform, to provide access to a large-scale and growing collection of student short films, belonging to the significant and historic VCA Film and Television department, situated within the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, Australia. This dissertation is concerned with showing how the author as a professional staff member and later, an academic for the Film Department, focused on her practice of film producing using practice led, action research and reflexive inquiry to create a digital archive project. The topic of this thesis sits within the burgeoning field of screen production research and explores the discoveries the researcher made from and through researching her own practice. Through reflexive methods, such as journaling and narrative storytelling, the author constructed an embodied representation from the data, tracing her journey of practice as a screen producer and educator. Her concern was providing access to an archive of student short films that dated back to 1966, that were mostly inaccessible to students, staff and researchers. The process evolved into a large-scale digitisation, preservation and access project, whereby the author both developed and realised a ‘living’ digital archive. This has enabled widespread access to the student film audiovisual archive, that was otherwise inaccessible. The digital archive holds retrospective film works from VCA Film and Television and continues to grow each year with contemporary student works deposited into its system. In producing this project and examining the process, it extended the author’s professional knowledge as a screen practitioner and educator. It also resulted in the development of a ‘living’ theory; as the researcher embodied the actions of the project and research, new knowledge was created through insight into the researchers practice of screen producing. Thus, this project makes an important contribution to audio visual history in film schools and the field of moving image archives. The dissertation offers a firsthand, self reflexive account into the practice of film producing and how it can be applied to the development and realisation of a digital archive project to create new audiences and contexts across the nexus of teaching, learning, research and industry engagement and contribute to the development of practice. This deep insight into the practice of screen producing makes this a significant addition to the field of screen production research. The creative constituents of the research contain both an online digital archive portal, that stores and preserves over 2,000 student short films dating back to 1966, and an established workflow to enable all current and future born digital works to be digitised and preserved. The films have been carefully curated into genres and are accompanied with rich metadata, offering unprecedented access to staff, students, researchers and the public. The digital archive portal facilitates access and recognition into the discipline of tertiary screen filmmaking and production, by drawing attention to its contribution to the cultural fabric of Australian life and its potential for impact within a national and global context