Navigating Friction: A Filmmaker’s Exploration of Collaborative Storytelling in Fiction Production

Film and television fictions serve as powerful cultural artefacts that can influence and reshape societal perceptions. Fiction can have potentially radical implications. Yet how such artefacts are developed, produced and marketed is complex, and a process that is not often revealed to all. As a practitioner and educator in filmmaking practices my research revolves around making of fiction, with a major focus on what stories actually get produced and made, and who gets to make them. As a filmmaker I do not lack imaginative ideas, but these ideas are limited by codes and conventions, resources and influence, or lack thereof.

Limitations have never stopped creativity, in fact the opposite, but as practitioner/academic Stoneman (2012) discusses, filmmakers need space for dangerous creation, to be able to embrace uncertainty, chance and risk. All of these elements have the potential to cause friction, and it is this friction that producers, funders and/or financiers find hard to deal with. In fact, the least amount of friction the better. Yet it is this friction that sustains radical and imaginative work.

In this paper, I want to explore the messy production process through my own practice of producing and directing a short fiction film, About the Night (2023). My goal was to craft a narrative that captures life's intricacies and fosters empathy without dictating emotions. Each step of the way there were creative choices with all of them done in collaboration. As a research project, I centred on these collaborations and documented the frictions (uncertainty, chance and risk) that lead to productive compromises. The emphasis was on crafting a story that emerged from a collective voice, rather than being solely shaped through the lens of an auteur. In this process, if we all did not embrace the friction, we jeopardised the radical potential of the film.