Abstract
Filmmaker Christine Rogers and poet Jane Frank began their collaboration with a desire to film, and write about, the sky as subject, absent from human connection. They sought to challenge film framing that is human-specific and pursue their common interests in place and the nonhuman. Central to this project, they ask, how can we frame the sky? For a filmmaker and a poet, framing is profoundly different, and they undertook their own experimentation with the aim of bringing their work together. They set themselves one hour per day, over ten days, to film or to write a poem about the sky in their home locations, Buderim and Brisbane. Referencing creative collaborations and using the methodology of creative practice research, they explored what framing and abstraction means in their own practice and how their close observations might speak to sustainability and the value of place.
After the ten days were complete, the shots and poetry were edited together, and they discovered that for Jane, it was difficult to absent herself without falling back on abstraction; that the sky is entwined with her imagination. For Christine, the abstraction of a blank sky proved uninteresting, and she had needed to include trees, balcony posts and a magpie to situate the sky and herself more clearly in her local environment. The resulting short film, Ten Days of Sky, rich with complex meanings, explores the sky as subject and object that exists above us and in us, and in true collaborative form, this is a work that neither Jane nor Christine could have made on their own.