The Socials
By Reece Donovan, Tom Winship and Siobhan Finn

"The Socials" was a project filmed for our Year 10 Media class at Western Heights College. It was shot on traditional video, and at the time, we didn't have ready access to the equipment needed to dump and edit the video on computer - which was at the VCE campus. Some years later I found the videotape and edited up what content was available.

Some facts about The Socials:

  • The cigarettes used in the Jock scenes are not real and were created by colouring an orange square on a piece of paper, adding the small blue print, rolling up the paper, gluing it and then burning the end. These had a very long burn time, and being fake, enabled us to shoot these scenes by getting us around the red tape surrounding students and cigarettes. We joked that "smoking" these fake cigarettes would have been worse than using actual cigarettes due to all the fumes given off by the burning glue in the cigarettes. So convincing were these replicas, that there was a demand for them in the media class and I began selling them for fifty cents each
  • Due to my excitement with the use of "LSMaker", the final scene was to be an epic light sabre duel between "The Fatboys" and "The Jocks". It was a grand vision and we had even brought the light sabres into school, but the footage never made it to tape
  • The lanky Matty G featured at the beginning of the outtakes below is now ripped
  • Our media teacher gave us an 'A' for our project even though we were unable to produce a final cut of the footage. Our storyboarding and vision was clear and we had shot most of the footage – he was understanding of the fact that we didn't have access to the proper technology to create a final cut
  • The character of the corrupted, smoking maths teacher played by Tom was based on one of our previous maths teachers at school
  • The footage was actually shot in 2003, although the opening scene states that "the study" occurred in 2002
  • Tom was particularly pedantic about the details in the chess scene, even though for most the shots the chess board was out of frame
  • The final redux cut was produced some 10 years after the initial footage was actually shot

Outtakes and Behind The Scenes