Tom Kelly Production Blog

Week 1

I’ve known about the Jew Boy Gang for several years, but only a rough outline of the story. It was told to me by my dad one day during a discussion about Australian History in the Hunter.

The first thing I thought was, it has all the makings of a film.

It had a strong protagonist, antagonist, three clear acts and an emotional arc for the characters. More than anything though it felt visceral. I kept the idea, hoping one day to write a feature script based around this story, for several years I never really got around to it. However, one day during the break after second year on my comms degree had wrapped, I found myself with two friends discussing ideas for what we wanted to do for our third-year documentary. With a love westerns and bushrangers between us, and wanting to do something in the docu-drama form, I remembered the Jew Boy Gang. I never considered doing it as documentary but in truth the facts of the events were just as visceral and film like.

It didn’t take long for us to know this is what we wanted to do.

We spent the first couple weeks researching and just developing a rough scope for the idea.

Week 2

Was all about forming a more official idea and deciding what everyone’s roles would be. I stepped into the role of the director/writer since I had a fairly good idea for the overall vision of the project and how all the technical and narrative elements would marry to create a cohesive piece of documentary work. It was also at this point of the project that as a group we decided that we wanted to use this short documentary piece as a trailer / springboard to eventually make a feature length/series telling the full story of the Jew Boy Gang. We thought our idea definitely had potential to be something bigger, there was just so much to the story of the gang.

Week 3

Was all about official research, we managed to find a lot of our research resources actually at the UON library. I checked out the book ‘An Organised Banditti’ by Colin Roope and Patricia Gregson. This book was a collated account of all elements of the Jew Boy Gang, the number of historical texts and research it drew on gave us the solid foundation we needed to build our story of The Jew Boy Gang. It’s also from the reading of this book that we singled out Edward Davis aka as Teddy the Jew Boy as our main focus of the documentary. The name’s sake of the gang and leader during their final months, Teddy was the perfect subject for our short form docu-drama. By writing the documentary around him we were able to have a focused lens for film that wouldn’t be overcrowded or burdened by other elements of the gang’s story.

Week 4

Was the week of our Pitch; this was a big pre-production week for us. During this week started planning the visual style of the film and sorting out our preproduction documentation (scripts, location forms, crew contracts etc.). In our pitch, we had: a complete script breakdown and structure; locations, characters and key events; a treatment; and a rough idea of stylistic approach for sound and visuals. For me this was week of getting the whole project out on paper. I worked mainly on the script elements and pitch elements while liaising with Lachie and Lachlan over sound and visuals style, as well as providing Sam with what he needed to fill out paperwork and organise logistics. In this week I started the conversation with Lachlan that we shoot a large majority of this film Silhouetted. This choice was three-fold; it would help bring focus visually to Teddy (Non silhouetted); It replicated the feel of the old black and white newspaper cartoons of the gang we had found in our research (which were the only visual references we had for the gang); it would also help budget constraints in terms of production design and allow us to cut some corners without looking cheap. Additionally, I began talks with Lachie over the score for the film this week. Me and Lachlan can both play instruments and had already decided to do the score ourselves, this week however we decided on the style and where we would draw our influences from. We primarily looked at the score for Dead Man by Neil Young

Week 5

We continued with preproduction. With Lachlan I finalised the silhouette/studio 40s Hollywood and our plan to shoot it within the ICT building at the University of Newcastle’s TV studio. We decided to construct our own diffusion screen to shoot against with shower curtains and stands. We set up a day to do test shoots over the next week with the set up to make sure we could achieve the vision we both had. Also, this was the week that we cast our Teddy, we settled on actor I knew called Luke Consani. By happenstance Luke fit the descriptions of Teddy we found in our research and was in the same rough age range as well. I discussed the project with him over the week, being friends with him I think he understood me well enough that he could see the vision I was going for and the kind of physicality he would have to inhabit. Discussing his performance, we decided on an almost stage like presence, having no dialogue in the film it relies entirely on the physicality of his movements.

Week 6

We shot our test footage at the university with the silhouette set up. Through experimentation with the equipment, we planned to use we got the image we were after. I edited together a small clip of the test footage to show some peers, to see if people liked the style and thought it was engaging. After a range of positive feedback and some suggestions we decided to go ahead with it for our shooting during the break. Furthermore, this week with Lachlan we drew up the storyboards from my script and liaised with the group that we were all happy to proceed into production with the story and structure we had.