The Commission
Turn Around was a site-specific live cinema commission for the Frankston Arts Council — a real-time film made with 15 students from Years 10, 11 and 12 at Frankston High School. Shot, edited, and scored live in the streets around Frankston Arts Centre on the night of 8 May 2026.
The students were not performers following a script. They were co-authors of a live cinema event — navigating their own school building after dark while two roaming camera operators transmitted live footage back to Cube 37, where I cut the film in real time. Composer Montgomery scored alongside. The edit station, hardware, and cabling were visible to the audience throughout. The labour of making the film was the film.
The Dogma of Live Cinema
"No pre-recorded footage. No second takes. Every cut, camera move, and musical note must happen in the moment. It is dangerous, it is immediate, and it only happens once."
The School
The thematic heart of the work was Frankston High School itself — a building the students knew intimately, made strange by being filmed in it after dark. The film's visual grammar asked: what does a familiar institutional space feel like when you are no longer bound by its rules?
Frankston High School was not the backdrop. It was a co-author. Its architecture, its atmosphere, and its relationship to the students who had spent years within it shaped every creative decision from the first workshop to the final frame.
The Process
The week-long residency built from trust and presence toward full technical and dramatic integration. Monday and Tuesday were workshops at Cube 37 — probing how the body behaves in institutional spaces, introducing the camera relationship, and establishing the visual register of the film through slow cinema duration exercises.
Wednesday was the pivot: a morning technical stress-test of the complete signal chain without cast, followed by the first full ensemble run. That evening's debrief produced the editorial map I used on performance night — a profile of each student's genuine presence versus managed performance, and the specific cues most likely to close the gap.
Thursday was the first full run at Frankston High School. The location changed everything. Student-specific cue profiles were deployed via the Nexus Command system for the first time. Technical lock at 15:30. Friday: performance at 19:30, Q&A at 20:30.
The Performance
The 45-minute performance moved through three phases: an opening of contained, whispered self-consciousness as students navigated the building after dark; a middle section in which genuine exchanges and unplanned moments surfaced; and a final integration in which the edit, score, and student presence arrived at something unrehearsed and unrepeatable.
At 17:00, a single message had been broadcast to all 15 students simultaneously: "Tonight is not a performance. It is the last time this particular group of people will be in this particular building together." As the Q&A opened, a final cue went out: "Tell them one true thing about tonight." The system that had shaped them all week fired once more, publicly, into the room.
