The Master of Arts Screen is a two-year course transforming emerging creatives into leaders in their field. The program is delivered in 9 disciplines and includes cross-disciplinary projects designed for students to specialise according to screen productions’ fundamental collaborative nature.
Through exploration and understanding of screen practice, students gain insight into their creative processes and voices. The visual poem is one such exercise, focusing on cinematography, composing, and editing – a probe into each discipline’s language and tools.
The exercise culminates with a small orchestra’s live recording of the music scores. The composers conduct the musicians while the cinematographers and editors collaborate on a live broadcast, enabling students to see their work coming to life through the performance of professional musicians.
We talked with the crew behind the Suture, Zeest and Bodyweather visual poems to learn about their process, inspiration and learnings.
Suture
Cinematographer Tim Oxford, composer Genevieve Patrick and editor Jack Needle approached the visual poem by bouncing ideas and themes for visual and musical explorations in an evolving dialogue of disciplines.
“I felt we would be passing the baton between each of us and wanted to make sure it wasn’t too prescriptive. So, I think it was more about giving little clues in the sense that it gives you the freedom to interpret it in the way you want,” explained cinematographer Tim.
Tim came up with the core idea around the theme of intoxication and the various forms in which one can feel intoxicated, either through a substance like alcohol, from overeating, or from the intensity of feeling and emotion.
“While shooting it, I was coming out with images that were deliberately ambiguous. I was less specific in meaning and more driven by intuition,” explained Tim.
Suture explores dream logic, the expression of nightmares and altered states of consciousness. As Tim experimented with framing, movement, colour, texture, light and form, Genevieve translated the tone and expression of the piece into harmony, dynamics, tonality and melody.
“Our craft is informed by the picture and narrative. As a composer, I write to the picture. I am informed by the mise-en-scene as well as the ideas that we had discussed before,” she added. “I wrote some draft music and gave it back to Tim to experiment. Then I wrote another cue based on what he had shot and some of the images he had sent.”
The editing process started after the studio shoot with the actors, with images and music driving the process for editor Jack. The openness of the non-linear process ultimately led the edit to also influence the final music score – this approach was fundamental for deep exploration of each discipline.
“I think it worked because there’s a high level of trust between all of us. So, we trusted that we were all on the same page. We were all contributing equally,” explained Jack.
The final piece experiments with space, dreaming and identity with an ambiguous ending, according to Tim. “It’s more about transformation in the sense of whether that’s between two people or not. It’s like a transference between one and the other, the dream is the connective tissue,” he said.
For Genevieve, the key lesson from Suture was the importance of dialogue and time in the creative process: “Those ideas had been cooking for so long, it was like it was in a slow cooker. And when it came out, it was super delicious because we had invested all this time in it at the beginning, and I did learn about my personal creative practice. Not only is early collaboration good, but it is also really important to be informed by the image. Every frame has so much information. Tim did a great job packing so much visual imagery in the frame.”
The rich imagery and cinematography craft in Suture has been recognised with the Silver ACS NSW Award in 2024 in the Art, Innovation, and Specialised Cinematography category. Tim agreed with the benefits of early collaboration: “I think it really helps the film in the sense that you have a lot of people coming to the table with different perspectives, but they all start to converge on a common point.”
The collaboration and experimentation encountered through the non-linear approach allowed the trio to practice in new ways. Jack said, “It was a great experiment in not having a script and telling a story with images alone. It was a lot of trying things that didn’t work. But it eventually started to form this coherent story. I learned about writing in a way, or how to tell a story just by responding to the images.”
Zeest
Cinematographer Disha Mukherjee, editor Adisha Bansal and composer Gareth Hudson’s Zeest evolved from a feeling of love and expansion.
“Under the sea, there’s a feeling of vastness that surrounds us,” said Disha, explaining how, as a diver, her first instinct was towards the ocean. She said that that first urge transformed into the vastness of the mountains when she came across a poem from Baba Sheikh Farid describing a ravenous crow who listens to the final words of a dying man. With his last breath, the man pleads with the bird not to consume his eyes, as he longs to see his beloved one final time.
The camera explores the crow’s point of view, revealing the vastness of mountains reaching to the sky, explains editor Adisha.
“It’s the crow’s journey of empathy and understanding. The crow is sweeping and hunting, and then a sudden moment of pause, and the shot changes, and the feeling changes,” she said.
Disha and Adisha shot during the -20C winter in the Himalayas, in the cold desert of Ladakh, staying at army base camps to access remote regions in the mountains devoid of human presence during that time of the year.
This vastness is visible on a theatre screen, explained Disha: “You really understand and see the depth because the buildings are so small on a smaller screen, they’re imperceptible.”
Shooting didn’t follow a shot list and script, it was about responding to the mountain.
“I think this was the first time I shot it based on what I was feeling at the moment, which was very different for me because I always shoot to a director’s vision,” said Disha.
Adisha approached editing by sampling all the shots to visualise how framing, colour, and texture could come together. More than four hours of footage would be cut into a three-minute piece.
“On my living room floor, I had 80 to 90 little pieces of paper, and I tried to do a paper edit. I constantly put one shot after the other, and I tried to make sense of it in a very tactile way,” she said.
“We did want to tell a love story, and the only textures I had on screen were mountains and water.”
Nature informed the edit and creative decisions. “It became an idea of two lovers that live parallel lives that never intersect,” added Adisha.
Zeest starts with long drone shots that build up to a change of point of view, revealing texture and movement, leading up to a montage, “which was the last breath, the life flashes in front of your eyes, and it’s everything from the stars to the crows to the water and the textures of nature. Then, at the end of it is the shot of a monastery,” said Adisha.
As no music had been used in the edit, Gareth responded purely to the images and was interested in local music to inform his composition. Disha and Adisha shared samples for Gareth to get the idea of the pitch, tempo, rhythms, and culture that flows in that region.
“I listened to that for weeks. I just had it on playlist going over in my head to soak it up subconsciously,” said Gareth, explaining that before composing, he mapped the story and the narrative elements. “That was my first mission, getting my head around the story, with all the elements, water, ice, this journey of water and earth.”
The way Gareth envisioned these elements was by representing them in the music as parallel motifs that later “come together”.
“[It’s]“the spiritual side at the end, the way we see the grandness of the mountains,” explained Gareth.
Disha noted how the three disciplines also come together, not only through this moment in the visual poem but also through the creative process: “It just opened up different ways of thinking. It was really interesting to me to see how everyone was processing this information very creatively and differently, and how we were all trying to come to the same thing,” she said.
“I think we ended up building something which was our version of love.”
Bodyweather
The crew behind Bodyweather – cinematographer Luke Torrevillas, editor Jack Charter and composer Kenneth King – started the process with the imagery followed by editing and music, with each discipline resonating directly with the materials.
Luke’s visual approach was to capture the performance work of two artists, Renay Ringma and Naasicaa Larsen, working through the Bodyweather system, “I needed to film something that was both abstract and surreal. The practice is very much a reflection to your surroundings, to nature, to the ground, from a body movement point of view.”
Founded by butoh dancer Min Tanaka in Japan, Bodyweather draws from Eastern and Western dance, sports training, martial arts and theatre practice. The three-minute performance was recorded in different spaces, and unlike other performance-based productions, it didn’t include any music.
To incorporate the different locations with a bend in time for the mother-daughter narrative arc, Luke added the volume stage (virtual production) to the mix, bringing a surreal element through the remix of footage with performance and creating a liminal space for all elements to come together.
“That volume stage was the dream stage. And even in that dream state or real-life story, this is all a figment of our imagination. In a sense, I go from the real to the surreal because the space in the volume is just as real as real life,” Luke explained.
The footage was then edited by Jack, with no music. “The exciting aspect of editing without temp was that I really had to focus on what emotion was given in each individual shot and craft something that not only visually flows together but also emotionally fits. An example of this was using the shots of the wide eyes of the dancer as a jarring cut to help reset tension/ transition to different scenes,” he said.
Kenneth explained how composing to images with no reference score required him to take a more directorial role in his approach: “What’s the emotional core of this? I needed to know what the whole thing was, and at each point, I needed to be inferring emotionally and then translate that.”
What came through the music was a perspective on the cycles of life and its cyclical nature, influenced by the freedom to experiment, he said.
Exploring horror themes was a way to set the process: “I believe in the saying that limitation breeds creativity. And so, by saying I want to exist within this slightly horrific realm and play around with those sounds that would be more kind of Bernard Herrmann’esque [Hitchcock key collaborator], I’m imposing a set of restrictions that inform emotionally and musically what I want to say within these limitations.”
From an editing perspective, Jack also leaned on the abstract nature of the exercise to experiment: “I wanted to utilise all the tools at my disposal to pull as much out of the footage as possible without being distracting.”
He added, “I’d say the iterative nature of the assignment allowed for a lot of creative freedom from all three of us. I really enjoyed just getting a bunch of footage with a very minimal handover and having the ability to sit with it and cut intuitively without a brief, which allowed the footage to dictate the edit. Without a clear united vision, it allowed each of us a chance to shine, which may have led to a more ambiguous story, but I think it created something pretty interesting and definitely worked when creating something as abstract as a visual poem.”
Up to this point, during the Master of Arts Screen program, music students had the opportunity to record music scores with small ensembles of professional instrumentalists for a variety of projects, but the visual poem would be the largest in scope, recording and broadcasting simultaneously from one of AFTRS’ main studios.
“To jump from six to a small chamber orchestra of around 20 players, with seasoned veteran players, was quite something. And it’s a sound that can’t be replicated. We do our best to record it and get it to translate, but it is completely different to be there on the day with the musicians playing for you,” Kenneth said.
Throughout the two years of learning, Master of Arts Screen students focus on individual roles and responsibilities within their discipline and developing craft-based technical knowledge and skills, leading to complex collaborative productions.
Master of Arts Screen graduates are screen storytellers capable of producing compelling, impactful work with high-level creative, technical and critical skills that allow them to work as advanced screen practitioners, innovative creators and leaders in their chosen field.
