Child's Play

What were you doing when you were 11 years old? It's difficult to think of any other question when watching I Am Eleven, the debut documentary for 30-year-old Melburnian filmmaker Genevieve Bailey, in which 23 11-year-olds in 15 countries are interviewed, creating a global portrait of a particular time, at the crest of childhood. Composing the score for the film was another 30-year-old Melburnian, musician/producer Nick Huggins, who will perform it live, accompanying the film for Melbourne Music Week.

“There's no other comparable situation where you play 28 short small pieces in a row over an hour-and-a-half, perfectly timed to something that dictates when you start and stop,” Huggins suggests of the task at hand. “It's not something that I've done before, nor have any of the great musicians I'm playing with on the night. We're all going into this quite fresh. We're learning how to do that. It's quite fun, actually, to try and get all the cues just right together, to hit the visual cuts so that the music changes with the picture.”

So, what was Huggins doing when he was 11? “I was obsessed with football. On my eleventh birthday I had a party at the MCG and Gary Ablett kicked twelve goals. That was extremely exciting for an eleven-year-old. Otherwise, I was doing a lot of drawing, running around, climbing trees. I didn't really play music, then, just a little bit of bad classical piano. I still feel like fundamentally the same person. Between the ages of eleven and thirty, I've tried a few different things, but I've mostly come back to the things I liked when I was eleven: football, climbing trees, making stuff in a quiet place on my own. When I was twenty, I probably would've answered quite differently, but at this stage of my life, I can relate much more to the things I liked as an eleven-year-old.”

Huggins and Bailey are old friends. “I met Gen Bailey on my first day of university, in 2001. She was a year above me in Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne, and she gave me a tour. She was pretty much the bubbliest person I'd ever met in my life.”

In 2007, Bailey would direct a music video for Huggins – a song called Movie We Made, no less – and, shortly thereafter, ask him to do the score for a film that she was in the middle of making; a passion project that found her uniting personal travel (the classic Australian backpacker's year abroad) with documentary filmmaking. Huggins and Bailey would work on the score, via use of rough edits, over two-and-a-half years. “Gen and I knew each other well enough that I never had to second-guess whether she liked something or not, she could just tell me,” he says.

The film is a mix of acoustic and electronic: tuned percussion with electronic beats, wooded-sounding ukuleles with synthesised keyboards; where “the guitar could be the childlike joy, the drum-machine could be the momentum, and the keyboard could be this darker contrast.” Explains Huggins, “the film is filled with children, and has that open and joyous atmosphere, a lot of inquisitiveness and life to it. But there's always a duality there; there's the lightness of their joyful expression, but then there's always the heaviness of the adult world around them.”