Life Savings: An Interdisciplinary Short Film Collaboration

Life Savings is a proof-of-concept project designed to test approaches for working across disciplines in the development of a 13-minute film. We provided multiple junctures for artists to contribute collaboratively to the project, and our goal was to prioritise this co-creation and collaborative relationship; we sought to emphasise the ‘move through relationships, not timelines or processes’ (Kelly & Coleman, 2019). The majority was shot in The Void, providing opportunities to be immersed within the creative possibilities of this infrastructure and to use the physical location as the metaphorical intersection for the collaboration. On a micro level the project has interrogated worldbuilding and representation in contemporary film making. On a macro level the project is a case study of practice seeking to document and reflectively analyse interdisciplinary collaboration which pushes creators outside their usual areas of expertise while exercising an ethic of care. Three strategies emerged across the case study as vital to the project’s success: iterative creative play, finding a shared language, and building a community of practice. In this chapter we critically analyse how our politics and values are reflected in worldbuilding choices, share our collaborative and interdisciplinary way of working, and provide illustrative examples of this collaboration.