Turn Around was a site-specific live cinema commission for the Frankston Arts Council, a real-time film made with 15 students from Frankston High School, shot, edited, and scored live in the streets around Frankston Arts Centre on the night of 8 May 2026.
The work brought together students from Years 10, 11 and 12 not as performers following a script, but as co-authors of a live cinema event. Over five days of workshops and rehearsals, they explored what their own school building felt like after dark, what the camera could find in a familiar institutional space, and what it means to make something unrepeatable in public.
The audience at Cube 37 watched a live feed of students moving through Frankston High School, transmitted in real time by two roaming camera operators, cut at an edit station positioned at the side of the stage, and scored live by composer Montgomery. The edit station, transmission hardware, and cabling were fully visible. The labour of making the film was the film. Nothing was concealed.
“Everything you are about to see is being made now, for the first and last time.”
Michael Beets, spoken frame delivered to the audience at 19:25
The thematic heart of the work was Frankston High School itself, a building the students knew intimately, made strange by being filmed in it after dark. The film's visual grammar asked: what does a familiar institutional space feel like when you are no longer bound by its rules?
Students navigated corridors, stairwells, and outdoor areas around Frankston Arts Centre as camera operators transmitted live footage back to Cube 37. The audience experienced the distance between the theatre and the streets as a live, breathing gap. Frankston High School was not the backdrop, it was a co-author. Its architecture, its atmosphere, and its relationship to the students who had spent years within it shaped every creative decision.
