From villagers in PNG comes the inspiration for creativity in film

How do you teach creativity? Or to put it more specifically how do you teach postproduction techniques including special effects and computer and graphic design in the film industry, and combine it with drama and music?

Dr Paul Wolffram, the director of the Miramar Creative Centre, Victoria University’s newest creative offshoot, found his answer in ethnology and musicology, specifically in the use of song and dance by the remotest tribes in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

He has a PhD in music and plays the trumpet and trombone (although not very much recently) and a is a lover of jazz specifically behop, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane, “not to everyone’s taste,” he concedes.

“I had no real direction in life and there are not a lot of jobs for a piano playing ethnologist.”

Paul has lived in villages in PNG, and as a white man was as strange to them as a dog walking on two legs. But, he says, he never felt unsafe or threatened, unlike in Port Moresby, the capital of PNG, and “the hellhole of the Pacific.”

The Miramar Creative Centre opened in 2017 and is next to Park Road Post Production and other facilities for the film industry. It has studios, sound labs, edit suites and the other facilities for up to 15 students working towards either a Master of Fine Arts or a Master of Design Technology.

Paul told of what he had learned from living among various tribes in PNG. The tribespeople see their dreams as stories and they sing them not narrate them, he said.

“A creative person is a community resource who helps build a stronger community. It’s not about who you are: it’s about the roles you play. You are a father, a brother, a son and so on.

“I remind my students to connect to people in their time and place. The stories we all tell are about relationships.”

With modern technologies, “we can dream big, act boldly and create our own reality.”

His students have already won domestic and international awards for their work and most go on to work in the film and creative industries.