Yes! The Inland Sea has a nice new intro thanks to the hard work and dedication of two talented Norwegians who have been studying in Melbourne in the last few years. The design of the sequence has been done by graphic designer Stig Bratvold, who also made The Inland Sea’s logo and the visual identity for our Twitter page and YouTube channel. It has been brought to life by animator Håvard Forland Isaksen, with music from French band Hasch’m'Meneum. I am forever grateful for their efforts and couldn’t be happier about the result.

Take a look for yourselves and feel free to let us know what you think below.

It should be added here that beyond the excitement of having a slick looking and exciting piece to introduce every episode, and a more defined visual identity across the web site and social media umbrella, it has been inspiring to work on the project over the last few months. Being the sole motor can get a bit ‘lonely’ and it has been extremely motivating to see others take an interest in the furthering of the series.

The revamped site design, as you may or may not have noticed, is still in process but we’re getting there. It has been made possible thanks to the helpful hands of Morten Warholm Haugen and Chris Scanlon.

Another inspiring note is that The Inland Sea was the second most watched series on KoldCast TV Thursday this week, with nearly 9,000 views in one day. There’s definitely excitement in those numbers.

Thanks are in order to Aydrea Walden ten Bosch who wrote this piece for The Sixth Wall, KoldCast TV’s blog, about Australian things (and people) who have made an impact on the world. No doubt this piece was driving factor for increasing the views for our show.

Make sure to catch up on previous episodes in their new packaging, and keep an eye out for brand new material, as the odyssey will continue next week. Join us on Facebook, and check back here regularly for exclusive content.

You can always find us on KoldCast TV, ‘the other TV network’, where you can browse a range of other original series, across all genres, made by independent filmmakers and documentarians.Tweet

"The Ship": Norwegian Asgeir Wølner lives 15 metres above ground in a tree hut called "The Ship".

There were really three things in particular that sparked the idea and framed the project. I wanted to work with multimedia narratives, something I had never done before. I was also very excited about the opportunity to travel through the outback. Additionally, I was curious about intentional communities in Australia. This was sparked by a couple of articles I wrote while I was in Norway back in 2007.

I heard about a place called Trehyttelandsbyen (The Tree Hut Village) outside of Oslo. Seven people in their 20s had purchased an old cabin and an acre of land in the forest. They decided the cabin was their communal space and each built their own tree hut surrounding it, to live in. These were small huts, from 12-20 square meters, some as high up as 20 meters above ground.

All the tree huts were built exclusively with second-hand materials, and they had also added two buildings on the ground – an art workshop and a sound recording studio. They were not connected to the power grid or the council’s sewage system, as they used an outdoor composting toilet to fertilize the soil in their vegetable gardens. The group had done extensive work on their land to grow as much of their own food as possible, opting for a sustainable lifestyle, in accordance with nature.

Photo gallery from Trehyttelandsbyen here.

After the group had lived in the village for eight years, the local council evicted them for breaching local building laws. The residents were also asked to tear down the tree huts. So began a long campaign for them to be recognized as an experimental eco-community.

Since then, the group has received much help in framing a proposal to the council, and as of mid-year 2010 they were successful, and have now moved back into their tree huts.

Read article in Dagsavisen (2007, Norwegian).Tweet

It is with a mix of excitement, nerves and total exhaustion that I now can finally present the first instalment of The Inland Sea: An Australian Odyssey. It’s an adventure and an experiment. It’s an online documentary made under mindboggling harsh conditions, while attempting to do too many things all at once. This, in order to replicate a somewhat extreme pressure on contemporary journalists to become “Inspector Gadget” reporters, mastering everything from writing to producing audio-visual material, making singular stories in to multimedia events.

Watch episode 1 here.

Our crew, three men and one lady strong, drove across Australia in ten weeks, covering a distance similar to that from Melbourne to Oslo. We had not a single interview set up before departure. We had little or no time to do prior research, and no previous insight to the interview subjects. Having driven for 12 hours non-stop, in 40+ degrees, we walked out of the car and straight into an interview, and then on to post a blog and photos online. Finally, we’d pitch our tents for a couple of hours of sleep before repeating it all again. We did this almost every day for ten weeks.

It has been just over two years since we returned from our adventure. It has taken this long to digest the experiences, and to get enough distance to the material to actually sit down and write and edit it, without being too conscious of myself, of us, being subjects in the narrative. That is, we’re not really. We made the stories, and rarely turned the camera on ourselves, because we were too busy chasing the next story. Hence, the stock footage has its limitations, both in what we’ve captured, as well as the quality of what we did capture.

The footage is rough, the sound occasionally very poor, and the editing likely to be a bit choppy along the way.

Having said that, I really don’t mean to be apologetic about the quality of the production. But, I believe it makes for an interesting project that reflects contemporary movements in the journalism industry. We now have so many tools at our disposal; only the imagination really sets the boundaries for development of new expressions and new genres. That is, as long as we learn to properly utilize the new tools we are offered, and as long as our editors and employers will allow us to experiment with them.

This was the impetus for the project. I came from a newspaper background, and besides being a useful point-and-shoot photographer, I didn’t really know much about the practical applications of visual journalism, let alone using audio, and building online publishing platforms. But, I’m slowly learning, and I’m eager to learn more.

Over the next few months, the webisodes will roll out approximately fortnightly. At this point I can’t say how many I will be making, but a rough estimate is 20, following our travel route. This coming part of the process is about making as much material, as many stories as I can out of what we’ve got.

We will visit ecovillages, encounter wildlife and talk about community experience in the outback. We will have audience with royalty, try to celebrate Christmas and new years very far away from home (with debatable success), and we’ll even go scouting for UFOs in the red centre.

The process has been amazing and awful at the same time. It has been overwhelming and exciting and, not to mention, eye opening. It has been, and will continue to be, a path of stratospheric highs and equally remarkable lows.

My hope is that at the end of the journey, I will have learnt a whole lot – and you will have been reasonably informed, perhaps even entertained.

Cheers,

SteinarTweet

A presentation of The Inland Sea at La Trobe University during the Media and Cinema Studies Program’s postgraduate conference in November 2010.

Abstract:

The Inland Sea: An Australian Odyssey is an online travel documentary. Over ten weeks in 2008/09 Steinar Ellingsen and a team of three travelled 16,000 km through Australia. The impetus for the project was to look for alternative communities in remote, rural and suburban Australia.

Last year’s presentation was based around a literature review discussing the theoretical framework of the project, which is best described as an experiment in convergence journalism – by a journalist with a background exclusively in paper.

As The Inland Sea is about to be edited and released as short episodes online over the coming months, this presentation will focus on form and content and background for the online documentary.

Topics to be covered include: online publishing; multimedia journalism on the web; the thematic background for the project; and the bilingual element of the documentary (English/Norwegian).Tweet

It’s a first time for everything, and perhaps a belated one as such in this instance. I recently wrote a piece about The Inland Sea in Norwegian. The article appeared in ANSAnytt, a quarterly magazine for Norwegian international students worldwide, published by the Association of Norwegian Students Abroad (ANSA).

Get the full article (in Norwegian) here.

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Note: Under the banner PhDelirium, I will be blogging about the project, sharing my excitement and frustration with the tasks at hand. I also want to use this space as an online research journal of sorts, to share more fully the ins and outs of the project.

Right. After a year of reworking the project and upgrading my candidature to a PhD, it is finally time to start our ‘second trip’ around Australia.

Just over a year ago we were in the middle of the desert, crossing the Nullarbor, on our way back to Melbourne after 72 days of charging through the Australian outback, armed to the teeth with cameras and laptops, and other recording devices.

We were coming home from an odyssey that none of us could possibly wrap our heads around pre-departure.

It was extremely weird to come back to Melbourne. It had been an extended period of camping, working around the clock in burning heat, and often driving for days without much social interaction beyond the personnel in the car.

Coming back to Melbourne, all we wanted to do was to hide away and not talk to anybody. I think it funny in a way, seeing we had set out to explore the notion of ‘community’ in the outback. I will consider this point to greater extents in upcoming blogs.

Going over the footage, we soon discovered that what we had shot on the road was something very different to what we had initially thought. Then again, I’m not sure we even really knew what we thought it would be like in the first place.

We were throwing ourselves out there to see what we could find, and trying to make sense of the unknown as we rushed onwards in a battle against time.  We often referred to our trip as ‘the Japanese tourist’-version of documentary making. Hence, some ‘holes’ were to be expected in the film stock.

To a notable extent, the footage we got suffered because of three main things: little time for planning the documentary pre-departure; limited time to travel, rarely giving us more than two-three days in each place; and finally, our very poor sound gear.

Having gone through the motions from excitement to outright despair in the last year, it is with a refreshed pair of eyes that I am now going back to the footage, to present the material, with the benefit of hindsight. It’s an exciting task (at least at the moment) to now go back and revisit what we actually did get, work out ways to present it online, and cataloguing the process of editing as well as the trip itself.

I believe there are still good stories there to be told.  Different from what I had imagined at the start, perhaps. But there are stories to come that definitely do focus on the notion community – from alternative communities such as a handful of ecovillages and the micronation Hutt River, to community groups like Care for Hedland in Port Hedland, monitoring turtles on the local beaches, the Margaret River Soupie, a group of tree-logging protesters in a WA forest.

There are stories about people – and places. Some very short stories, some longer stories. Some little interviews, some bigger.

There is some Australiana; snakes and crocodiles, and the desert spectacular that this country has to offer. There is even a failed attempt at discovering UFOs in the red centre.

So without too much ado, I say it’s time to get started.

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