Introduction

In the current atmosphere of coronavirus quarantine, a wide variety of artists, musicians and creatives have started posting content online while observing the COVID-19 lockdown. From concerts via social media live stream to dialogues and discussions by figures of the artworld, creative and artistic communities have made efforts to establish presence on the internet to promote productive use of time and build solidarity, awareness and unity in isolation through online communication. Artists and creatives have found new ways to connect with audiences by putting their skills and knowledge to use via the internet, establishing timely conversations, raising funds, promoting self-care and care for others, and redirecting audiences to official channels of COVID-19 related information and relief. One very effective example of the collaborative and multidisciplinary engagement between artists for a cause is an animation produced to raise awareness about coronavirus prevention in various First Nation and Aboriginal communities in the Northwestern region of the Kimberley in Australia.

The animation combines the joint effort of contemporary artists and professionals, from filmmakers, directors, painters, animators, sound engineers, music composers to voice-over artists, performers, and translators, whose collaboration during quarantine has materialized in this community-specific piece of work to raise awareness and provide key contextual information. In our view, this effort sets an example on how artists, producers, creatives and other professionals can come together to make use of their skills, experience and knowledge within their respective fields to combine creative forces to reach out to marginalized and dispossessed communities that face an altogether different set of challenges in this time of extreme vulnerability.

In our view, the animation also brings forth a model of creative collaboration, that once implemented successfully, can engage different organizations to provide additional support, while also creating a framework of community-level engagement to emulate in other parts of the world where different communities are more vulnerable than others. As such, Inverse Journal is proud to present the Kimberley Coronavirus Animation that has been circulating widely around the internet and social media. We have also included an exclusive interview with its producer, director and editor, Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman, who took the time out to answer essential questions via email to familiarize international audiences with the whole project, its specific cultural context, and the creative collaborations that made it possible (in association with different organizations jointly working on providing COVID-19 related relief).

The Kimberley Coronavirus Animation

Animation Credits

Produced, directed and edited by Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman in collaboration with Nirrumbuk Environmental Health & Services (Pty Ltd) Chris Griffiths and Alana Hunt and Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Services.

Funded jointly by Nirrumbuk Environmental Health and Services and Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Services.

Animators
Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman
Lindsay Cox
Ushan Bailey Boyd
Mark Cochrane

Artwork
Maya Sollier
Michael Camilleri
Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman

Music composition and narration
Mark Coles Smith

Sound effects and mastering
Wawili Sound Solutions

Translation
Chris Griffiths and Alana Hunt

Filming
Lynley Nargoodah

Performance
Wyatt Nargoodah

Thanks to Sarah Morris, Ben Houston and Brooke Small

Source: https://vimeo.com/407920895

Interview with Director, Producer and Editor Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman

Inverse Journal: Can you tell us about the thinking process, motivations and aesthetic choices involved in the production of your video animation? Who is it addressing and what drove you to choose such a medium of storytelling to raise important concerns about such a pressing issue?

Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman: I am currently living in Melbourne, far away from the Kimberley region, a place I’ve lived in and loved for eight years, being connected to it for almost 20 years, and was due to return to later this year. I was seeing the coronavirus begin to take hold across this region and felt immense concern for the people there, many of whom were elder artists I have worked with over the years, as well as the communities I’d lived with, where people are extremely vulnerable in terms of overcrowded housing, co-morbidities, limited access to health care, poverty, and all such problems that stem from colonial violence.

The Kimberley has limited healthcare and a week before we began the animation, there were outbreaks in hospitals in different towns. This meant that healthcare workers had to be quarantined, severely diminishing the capacity of the staff. At that stage, the roads in and out of the Kimberley had not been closed down, so there was still a lot of movement in and out of these communities. Supermarket supplies were running out and becoming extremely expensive (they are usually very expensive anyway) due to people in cities stockpiling groceries. I felt powerless in my ability to do something. I was relaying these concerns to a friend and he suggested I make an animation about the coronavirus. Initially, I was sceptical as I assumed there were plenty of health resources being provided to communities to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. After conversations with health workers, especially Sarah Morris, from Kimberley Aboriginal Health organisations and especially while communicating with people I knew in these communities, I decided it would be beneficial to create this animation.

Alana Hunt and Chris Griffith were instrumental in identifying the required tone of the animation, which was to be one of horror in regards to the virus itself, in order to ensure the message hit the mark. The tone of horror needed to be balanced with one of empowerment, since it’s dangerous to create fear about a situation without providing apt solutions and informed preventive measures.  Chris, Alana and other people around the Kimberley were incredibly fearful that the messages about coronavirus health measures weren’t getting through to their community. They made the suggestion of using a storyline about a person’s journey as a key narrative thread, which I agreed was an effective structure from which to weave the specifics points around.

I’ve worked with a number of Kimberley artists from different language groups on animations and have seen how powerful animation can be in telling a story, and in transmitting knowledge.

Animation allows for a magical element—it offers the ability to transform scale, make invisible things visible, to fully enable the creation of imagined worlds, characters and scenarios. Using digitally animated paintings gives a handmade feel, and people in the Kimberley have a deep respect for art and painting in particular, I think more so than the mainstream population. Painting in the Kimberley occupies a very special place for its peoples, it has a deeper cultural and often ceremonial significance attached to it and embedded within it. Although there were non-indigenous people painting the images for this animation, the medium still has great traction, nonetheless.

Inverse: The video is set in the Kimberley, the Northwestern region of Australia. Can you provide the context of the animated work in terms of what the Kimberley represents as a region with a variety of peoples?  How does the video, even though addressing its residents, speak to audiences everywhere around the world in conveying the same informed message of prevention and safety?

Bernadette: I’m not sure this animation addresses audiences everywhere—I feel that it’s very specific to conditions of place and of culture as these types of health resources should be. It will be interesting to see how people from other continents receive it though, and perhaps the visually and aurally anthropomorphised characterisation of the virus we used will resonate with people in other parts of the world.

Inverse: What specific need and motives in particular to the Kimberly inspired you and your team to develop such an elaborate and visually engaging work?

Bernadette: From what I understood after conversations with people in communities and health specialists, many people in the Kimberley weren’t grasping the seriousness of the pandemic especially as it was yet to take hold there. The idea for creating a large scale, anthropomorphic virus character was one way we could highlight the real and present danger of the coronavirus as an evil force to be reckoned with. The two sound designers, Petris Torres and Mark Coles Smith are both Kimberley Aboriginal people who I’ve worked with extensively. They created a soundtrack with detailed sound effects, engaging music composition which utilised multiple instruments including traditional instrumentation such as kali (boomerangs). The emotional tonality of the music and voiceover, both created by Mark who is a voice actor as well as sound designer and musician, are crucial elements in taking people on that journey.

Inverse: Tell us about the dialect and accent of English used in the voice-over narration in the animation. Do you feel that it was necessary to make the video relatable to specific communities? How efficient do you think it has been so far in reaching out and speaking directly to people in specific communities and cultures within the vastness of Australia’s general population?

Bernadette: It was absolutely vital to make this animation culturally specific to the Kimberley communities. The narration is a mixture of Kimberley Kriol and Aboriginal English, and it was necessary to use these languages as they are spoken across the Kimberley and the Pilbara regions, although in some areas a much heavier Kriol is spoken. Kriol is classified as a distinct language rather than a dialect, although there are different regional variations of it.

So far, the animation has been shared across the Pilbara region of the South of the Kimberley and also in the Northern Territory to the East of the Kimberley, mainly in the Northern area. Aboriginal Interpreting Western Australia is working on translations for least five Kimberley and Pilbara languages including Martu, Walmajarri and Nyangumarta so that it the animation is accessible to these language speakers. We’ve had contact from people in the Cape York Peninsula region of Queensland expressing the need to have it translated into eight other languages from that region, including Wik Mungkan—so it has become a very internationally collaborative and iterative process through language translation.

Inverse: How does such an artistic elaboration vary from, for example, a video with the same message coming from the Australian capital or from a big media outlet? Here, we are interested in finding out about the culture-specific aspects of the video that distinguish it from a more mainstream deployment that is already present through Australian mass media on such a subject. What is particular to the language, tone, dialect we hear in your video? Again, referring back to the previous question.

Bernadette: This continent is so vast, with hundreds of Aboriginal languages and nations and an incredible diversity of cultures that have huge variations. Mainstream ‘Australia’ ignorantly tends to overlook that diversity, and the fact that they live within a globalized and international context within this very continent. This is a very problematic consciousness. Accessibility and awareness is a huge concern, especially when it comes to crucial health communications about a pandemic.

The major difference between this animation and something produced for mainstream audiences is language and the specificity of messaging that speaks directly to the living conditions, place and cultural relationships in the Kimberley region. The strong culture of sharing and helping each other out, close family ties and community relationships are considerably different to those in capital cities, where individualism and nuclear family units are much more common. For example, it was really important to re-conceptualise the idea of “helping each other out” to mean not visiting, not giving lifts and maintaining physical distance.

Inverse: Tell us about the artistic collaboration process and the team effort in the background between everyone involved in the project to bring about this final animation that you’ve released. How did it all begin and gel together in such a manner and how did artistic and professional collaboration impact the outcome of your project?

Bernadette:  Initially, I began storyboarding and scripting in tandem. This storyboard was sent to Sarah Morris who coordinated feedback from the Kimberley COVID-19 taskforce and other Aboriginal health specialists. It was also sent to Chris and Alana for feedback. Eventually we settled on a structure. Firstly, knowing that sound design constitutes more than half of any animation or film, I asked Mark Coles Smith and Petris Torres if they could assist with sound design, music and narration. I then put a call out to my networks for animators and painters so we could fast-track the process. Lindsay Cox, Mark Cochrane and Ushan Bailey Boyd all put their hands up to assist with animation. Maya Sollier and Michael Camilleri offered to paint a siginificant amount of images we would need for each scene.

We also had to deal with working in pandemic conditions. The two other painters, Michael and Maya, each had difficulty sending their images to me digitally at high resolution, so it was necessary for me to pick up the physical paintings without entering their houses, so I met them on the front yard, they laid the work down and I collected it. I handled the paintings with gloves and photographed them on my light stand without touching them. All three of our painting styles are different but I feel they worked well together, and in fact make the animation more visually interesting.

All of the people who worked on this are extremely talented professional artists who have now lost nearly all of their daily work due to the pandemic. We all embarked on this journey to create the animation in a purely unfunded capacity, until Nirrumbuk Health and Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Service realised  it was necessary to fund our work when they saw the final product. This spirit of generosity really drove our collaboration.

The process actually created a whole new artist collective, many of the artists had never met each other, let alone worked together, so it’s also great to be part of community-building in that way.

Inverse: In your assessment, how important and relevant is it for artists and creatives to combine talents and skills to present such type of work at this particular time of distress? Do you think that perhaps as a unique artistic collaboration? the animated video sets a precedent and an example on how artists and creatives from other cultures can engage in raising awareness within their particular communities regarding COVID-19 prevention?

Bernadette:  I think the animation is a good example of engaging a group’s imagination and creativity to address crises and issues within our communities. I feel artists have the ability to create idiosyncratic, unusual and engaging stories that are skillfully rendered and detailed and this is the strength of our animation.

In my experience, artists work collaboratively quite frequently.  What we did is not a new thing, particularly in terms of working towards a common goal for greater good in the community, which is a crucial for all citizens—regardless of their profession—to engage in. As artists we rely heavily on our community for support and feedback and so I believe artists tend to have a very strong sense of community although there definitely can be a tendency towards isolation in our solo projects. That solitary and thoughtful work is really important too, but we are social creatures at the end of the day and ultimately our work is about connection and response.