We're thrilled to share the trailer for our film 'Milly', a narrative project we produced this year with ARDS Aboriginal Corporation. The film is to be used as a health education tool for young Indigenous women. The project saw us shooting on location in Nhulunbuy, Biritjimi and Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land with a wonderful local Yolngu cast. A comprehensive study guide was produced to accompany the film and we're pleased to hear that 'Milly' is being so well received by the young women and also by the health educators.

Thank you again to our clients at ARDS: Executive Producers Joy Bulkanhawuy and Emma Murphy; our fabulous lead cast of Zowie, Rachel, Roberta and Caitlin; and our fantastic crew: Cinematographer Sky Davies, Co-Producer Noni Eather, Sound Editor Tfer Newsome, Colourist Martin Greer and Animator Steph Comfort.

'Milly' was produced, written, directed and edited by Yarn.

We're very pleased to share our latest video campaign for The Bridge Employment, an organisation in Melbourne that assists young people with disabilities to prepare for work and find employment. For this campaign we worked with three young people - Lucy, Campbell and Vanitta - who very graciously shared their personal experiences of preparing for work and gaining employment. We produced one video story on each participant as well as a campaign trailer.

A big thank you to the team at The Bridge, particularly CEO Phillip Toovey, GM Ausra Wells and staff members Cindy Warren, Martina Netto and Fili Polataivao.

Scroll down to view the campaign trailer and the three video stories.

THE BRIDGE EMPLOYMENT - LUCY'S STORY

THE BRIDGE EMPLOYMENT CAMPAIGN TRAILER

---

THE BRIDGE EMPLOYMENT - VANITTA'S STORY

THE BRIDGE EMPLOYMENT - CAMPBELL'S STORY

---

We've just completed a new campaign trailer for our 11-part series for Victorian College of the Arts. The series profiles recently graduated alumni from the disciplines of Visual Art, Theatre, Production, Film and Television and Dance.

Check out the trailer below!

Filming is underway on our latest project with the City of Greater Geelong. We are documenting the construction of a very innovative project - an Artificial Reef off the coast of Portarlington, Victoria. Designed to mitigate tidal events, the approximately 100 metre long Artificial Reef will be constructed from steel cages filled with organic matter: scallop shells recycled from local restaurants. Work has commenced on the steel cages and several tonnes of scallop shells are being turned intermittently in a sunny paddock in St Leonards, waiting to be packed into the cages. It's anticipated that the reef will be 'greened' in order to offer a complementary benefit to the local ecosystem and encourage sea life to infiltrate the structures.

The deployment of the reef will take about two days and will occur later in 2017. We are looking forward to capturing underwater images and aerials of this very exciting event.

- Bridget O'Shea | Producer, Yarn

We were really pleased to welcome the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) as a new client a few months ago. We’ve been working with DELWP on the Geelong Citizens' Jury, which took place across three weekends in October and November. This is the second Citizens' Jury project for Yarn, the first being VicHealth's Victorian Citizens' Jury on Obesity in 2015. 

For this Citizens' Jury we produced a series of short vignettes on three jury members as they moved through the jury process. Our jury members Meryl, Antonia and Tim were an absolute delight to work with, as were our clients at DELWP - Lou Curry, Kim Sullivan and Salyana Williams. It was great to again work alongside Iain Walker and Kyle Redman of newDemocracy foundation as well as working with the facilitators, MosaicLab: Nicole Hunter, Keith Greaves, Kimbra White and Jane Lovejoy.

The background to this Jury is as follows: Following the dismissal of the Greater Geelong City Council in April 2016, the Victorian government committed to consult the Greater Geelong community about the structure of its future elected council.  A citizens' jury of 100 randomly selected but representative Geelong residents considered the question: Our council was dismissed. How do we want to be democratically represented by a future council?

We've just returned from 10 amazing days in North East Arnhem Land shooting our film 'Milly'. The brief was to create two films to be used as resources in women's health education, primarily for the Yolngu women living in North East Arnhem Land. We're producing these films in partnership with ARDS Aboriginal Corporation and have been working closely with our lovely clients Bulkanhawuy and Emma Murphy for the last few months. Most of the time at Yarn we work in documentary so it's been a real thrill to work on a narrative client project and such a privilege and pleasure to help Bulkanhawuy realise her concept for this beautiful story. We're rapt to be working with Noni Eather as Co-Producer and Director of Photography Sky Davies, along with our fabulous cast of Yolngu women who delivered incredible performances over long days and absolutely mad end-of-wet-season-weather. A big thank you to everyone on the team - we're looking forward to getting into the edit! In the meantime, see below for some pics from the shoot.

- Bridget O'Shea | Producer, Yarn

Director of Photography Sky Davies

Sky, Bridget O'Shea and cast member Caitlin

Cast member Roberta, Katrina Channells and Latrell

Cast member Zowie with Co-Producer Noni Eather

Katrina Channells and Bridget O'Shea (Yarn)

Katrina Channells, Bulkanhawuy, Bridget O'Shea, Emma Murphy, Sky Davies

As part of our latest documentary Leaving Allen Street, we recently took some portraits of the subjects of the documentary, the residents, in their lovely new homes. It was a really fun shoot and we're so pleased to share these beautiful photos with the residents, their families and staff members. All photos by our friend and colleague John O'Rourke.

Katrina Channells and Bridget O'Shea of Yarn with resident Greg

In March I was really thrilled to attend Australia's peak conference for documentary, the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) held here in Melbourne at Federation Square. I was selected as one of six for ACCESS @ AIDC, a mentor program for early career documentary filmmakers. The mentors were particularly good this year - John Battsek (UK), Amy Hobby (USA), Ezra Edelman (USA), Jen Peedom (AUS), Donovan Chan (SGP) and Kelrick Martin (AUS). As part of the program the mentees had one hour group sessions with each mentor over the course of the conference. Everyone was so generous with their time and it was great to connect with directors and producers who are really at the top of their game (the majority were Academy Award nominees or winners). The conference itself had really fascinating sessions with a lot of local and international delegates from the whole spectrum of documentary. I met some fantastic people - including my five fellow mentees - and it was a really productive time. Thanks for having me AIDC!

Bridget O'Shea | Producer, Yarn

For something a bit different, Yarn held a panel discussion recently at the inaugural ThinkWest Festival - a festival of philosophy and culture across Melbourne's inner west, which is where Yarn is based. Produced by the School of Life, the festival featured more than 40 workshops, tours, classes and special events.

We were chosen by the festival as one of the local grant recipients and our panel was titled "Storytelling: The Moving Image and Social Impact". Bridget moderated the conversation, and along with Katrina, we invited our friends and colleagues Producer Mary Minas and Editor Robert Fearon to join the panel. Held at Back Alley Sally's in Footscray we discussed how to tell challenging stories in film and documentary while also creating a sustainable career. Many thanks to program producer Anna Schoo - it was a really fun night. Onwards to ThinkWest 2017!