Helicopters, Handlers, and Drinking Alcohol by Day: How a Forum was Made

This story is the sixth part of Munted – a seven-part video series that tells the story of the Christchurch earthquakes. Watch all seven episodes.

For a decade, 200 hours of footage documenting Christchurch earthquakes remained unseen and unused in a cardboard box in a press newsroom. Michael Wright talks to the two reporters who are starting to watch it all, and tells a new story about the town’s recovery.

There is a clip in episode five of Munted, Stuff’s video series about Christchurch earthquakes, that may not be used anywhere else. As a team of press workers went out to report in the eastern suburbs of the city in December 2011, a huge aftershock struck. The camera of visual journalist Dan Tobin Stuff was rolling around at the time, recording the shivering in all his rage.

After the shaking stopped, Tobin crossed the road and found Resident Barry Smith, standing at the end of his driveway, holding a glass of wine.

“It helps, right?” Tobin says the camera pointed at the wine glass.

“I’ve lost half of it,” Smith replied, “Bloody finger cut.” The next word is whistling.

They discussed the amounts of aftershock for a while, something out of a sport in Christchurch at the time, and then Smith captured the moment.

“So strong, I’m afraid,” he says, “just when I thought they were done.” Take a long drink of wine.

Read more:

* Head of the earthquake: “It was difficult to keep your head at all times.”

* Wizard: Horrific losses as you predicted.

* Activist: There was no dialogue and no transparency

* Director: “It was very simple. It was good versus evil.

* Red zones: We had no toilet and no water. We were laughing. ‘

The first half of this clip, the vibration, was used extensively on stuff.co.nz in 2011, as part of comprehensive media coverage of more aftershocks plaguing the city that year. But Barry Smith and his wine in the mid-afternoon did not receive the same treatment. I have not received any treatment. The footage remained invisible on a hard disk, in a cardboard box, in a cupboard, in the press newsroom for nearly a decade.

“I knew he was there,” says Charlie Gates, a reporter for Stuff.

“I was always fascinated by the fact that there was a cardboard box in the cupboard that had all these hard drives containing all these amazing things in there and no one really looked at them.”

Dean Williams / Stuff

Munted was the brainchild of Stuff’s top correspondents, Philip Matthews, left, and Charlie Gates.

The catch was how to use it. The two hundred hours of partially-indexed archive videos filmed by Stuff visual journalists over the course of 10 years offered no apparent benefit to a media organization specializing in daily news. Gates and co-worker Philip Matthews came up with a solution while they waited for coffee one morning in 2018. They were both fans of Adam Curtis, a British documentary filmmaker specializing in telling disruptive stories about the themes of power, politics and society. They saw an alternate history of the Christchurch earthquakes, similar to the Curtis, complete with archive footage. Muntade was born.

“[It’s] Way [Curtis] It uses old footage to build an alternate narration of events that have a very specific narrative, ”Gates says.

“Everyone has a reasonable understanding of an event, and says, ‘Maybe he thought of it this way’ …[Munted is] Certainly more than a spirit of what it was like to live [the earthquakes] Kind of official history. “

In many ways, recovering from the earthquake in Christchurch was the perfect stage to see Gates and Matthews: a 10-year saga in which a city was shaken, demolished, rebuilt (kind of) and left to contemplate some of Curtis’ favorite themes – power and its impact on people.

The product is sarcastic, sometimes funny, and often dreary. Which, if you think for just a second about what an alternate date of the Christchurch earthquake might look like, is the only way it could be. A recent survey of 30,000 city residents found that only 29 percent felt that the city was now better than it was before the earthquakes. Matthews, who wrote and presented the series (Gates edited and directed it), was surprised that it was so loud.

Things

Ten years later, is there any hope?

“[Munted] Not an optimistic view of how the rebuilding process will end, “I think nine or 10 years ago we expected more than we have now.”

The series is divided along thematic lines rather than chronology. There is a demolition incident. One when protesting one in schools. One is on a blueprint for rebuilding the central city. Each is a study of how different groups experience these things. As Gates says, what it was like to live through it.

“There are two different responses,” says Matthews. There is an initial response from the community. People help each other, check out their neighbors, and get together. But at a higher level than that, power works in a completely different way and controls it. It is resisting the upward response. “

Inevitably, hugely powerful figures loom in Monted: Prime Minister John Key, Minister for Earthquake Recovery Jerry Brownlee, and, for a while at least, Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker. Matthews found himself drawn to the narrative arcs of the major characters as the story unfolded. Magic key everyone rides at sunset; Brownlee, divisive but unshakable until he is moved elsewhere and eventually out of government; Parker, the celebrated mayor and source of hope even the founders of his council, watches, knighted but helpless, as power shifts from Christchurch to Wellington.

Visual metaphors abound. The magician of Christchurch, who delivers eloquent prophecies throughout Mentead, appears in one of the episodes waving a long stick with firecrackers cursing those who “destroyed” the city, and later transferring the mantle to a young, bearded caliph. John Key, like Christ, arrives by helicopter in Episode 4 and departs in Episode 7. In fact, there are helicopters everywhere.

“Charlie loved helicopters,” says Matthews.

It’s really cinematic transportation, but also those footage of John Key landing and landing … He literally jumps out of a helicopter and goes up and says ‘Canterbury looked beautiful from the sky,’ says Gates. [It’s] Helicopter Pilot. “

Matthews: “And everyone says, ‘Oh, charisma.”

Things

Munted’s video series explores the social and political fallout of the Canterbury earthquakes.

Gates extracted hours of footage and put together sets of 90 minutes for each episode. Matthews watched them backed and rewrote his drafts accordingly. The footage was filmed over the years by a group of visual journalists on Stuff: Hamish Coleman Ross, Kirk Hargreaves, Joseph Johnson, John Kirk Anderson, Dean Kozanik, Ian McGregor, Chris Skelton, Stacy Squires, Daniel Tobin, David Walker and Alden Williams. It is no exaggeration to say that their work is the only reason for the existence of a mentor.

“Without them, it wouldn’t be possible,” Gates says.

Without them, we would never have been able to enjoy an extended meeting with Alec and Helen Doree, a delightfully strange couple of ‘residents’ of the abandoned residential red district. Or you heard from a young man, identified only as “Rouen”, who was in Cathedral Square on Boxing Day 2010 when a great follower struck and predicted “an earthquake so bad that the return of Christ must come.” Or Matthews’ personal favorite, a scene in which Brownlee and Keye, ex-Christchurch MP Nicky Wagner and Christchurch Mayor Leanne Dalziel stand on the bank of the River Avon, at some formal rallies, when the rains begin. The key, smooth as you like, quickly opens a large golf parachute for him and Dalziel to take cover under it. Meanwhile, Wagner stumbles with a much smaller parachute while Brownlee awkwardly waits, gets wet, and looks anywhere except what’s happening.

Gates says, “These are the things you’re looking for. Those little passages that were ignored at the time but now reveal something about the character or the city or something about what happened.”

This story is the sixth part of Munted – a seven-part video series that tells the story of the Christchurch earthquakes. Watch all seven episodes.

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