The Illawarra feature film project is a part of Beyond Empathy’s Out of the Blue strategy. Its goal is to produce, with Beyond Empathy participants, a feature film.

The project aims to improve the wellbeing, health and social participation of Beyond Empathy participants (young people who live with constant or recurring hardship) in the Illawarra. The project will work with up to 100 young participants over the next two years. Some of these participants will become a core group for the project and will complete accredited training in association with the project. Through their training they will write and produce their own short films, which will be promoted together with the feature film. The project will work in partnerships with various government and community organisations who also work with young people who experience recurring hardship. We aim to produce a feature film that speaks in the voice of people who are not often heard and speaks about both the hardship they experience and the resilience they develop.

It's a huge job to produce a feature length drama film - so the Out of the Blue film project is designed to be a ‘challenge’ for the participants and to also have multiple entry and exit points for participation. By facing the challenge of this project, the young people will have the opportunity to build and consolidate new skills, shake previous attitudes they may hold about themselves and begin to define a new story about themselves and their abilities/qualities.

Young people will be able to start their involvement at any point along the project and be able to do a little or a lot as their needs and capabilities develop.

The Out of the Blue feature film is not being produced from a predetermined script and will not have one central hero character. This creates its own challenges. To answer these challenges we will use a very fluid approach to the making of the film. Where a normal low budget film might shoot for a period of 6 or so weeks, we will shoot material over a period of 70 weeks. We will be editing the film as we go - so we will be able to see how the film's characters and stories thread and weave together. We will be able to see where we need new scenes, take the opportunity to reshoot scenes which are good but could be even better, and rethink story lines with the benefit of having some time taken to develop them.

Trying to create a conventional narrative out of this process might be like trying to push a camel through the eye of a needle so the Out of the Blue project won’t try and emulate conventional narrative structures. Out of the Blue will have a poetic, impressionistic take on film narrative. Out of the Blue will present the viewer with a collage of images from the semi-metropolitan suburbs of coastal steel city Wollongong, dropping in on the lives of its characters over the period of a year while they are growing up. It will be an exploration at the borderlands of feature filmmaking that will reflect the beautiful and challenging lives of its young collaborators.

For further information about this project, please contact Phillip Crawford on 0427 697 173 or at phillip.crawford@beyondempathy.org.au