The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

Brenda Leeuwenberg – Project Director, NZ On Screen

“NZ On Air was putting in place its digital strategy and, as part of that, they had evolved this idea that had been around for a while – to make available the archive of content, as much as possible the material that’s being produced in New Zealand. Unless you live in a city with a film archive where you can physically go and watch something in their space, so much of what’s being produced in New Zealand is just not available anymore. Some of it lives in boxes under the producers’ stairs, some of it lives in the archives and some of it lives just nowhere. So they wanted to resurrect that to make it available to the public and they decided to create this website, a little bit based on the way Australian Screen was doing it at the time. It’s gone in a different direction since then but they put some money together, they decided to fund it, there’s a Trust that’s been set up and I’m the manager of that Trust. What we do is we identify what goes on the site based on its iconic value or its place in New Zealand’s screen history or the people that worked on it – if it’s got a particular nostalgic twist. Then we create the list of things that should go on the site, we source them, we find out where they are, who the copyright holder is – we have to get copyright clearance for everything that we put on the site – and we digitise, write about, put online, research details about who the cast and crew were, we write profiles of key cast and crew and link those through to other things those people have done. So, for example, if you look up The Vintner’s Luck you could see it was directed by Niki Caro. You could look up Niki Caro’s profile and see that she also directed Whale Rider, you could go and look at pieces of that, you could go and see Footage, a short film that she made, you could go and see a music video from Straitjacket Fits that she directed. So you can really see the way people have moved through the industry in producing different kinds of screen material for New Zealand.”