About

Work

Photography

Contact

edward dang

IN
PASSING

/ work / eternity

Year

2025

Role

Director

Editor

Deliverable

Short Documentary

Dreamland

I. The Work

The Inner West. A place where, depending on who you ask, the same surface can be either a crime scene or a cultural landmark. Or both. Such tension, so messy, so unsettled, yet so alive, is precisely what we wanted In Passing to sit well within and to explore.

Our short documentary centres on two street artists who couldn't be any more different. Mistery, one of Sydney's foundational graffiti writers, contrasted with Oliver Wall, an emerging muralist with a formal fine arts background. In conversation with them, we painted a portrait of an overlooked subculture in constant negotiation with itself, over legality, authorship, meaning, and who gets to decide what belongs on a wall.

Narrative

To achieve our artistic ambitions, we landed on a hybrid documentary approach. Structurally, the film leans towards the (infamous) expository mode, for it's really dialogue-driven. No hard feelings here. Though we borrowed just enough from observational and essayistic, even poetic, to keep it from hardening into a lecture.

And there's the conversation. Or rather, two conversations to the fantasy of one. Despite never having met each other, the "dialogue" between Mistery and Oliver Wall forms the heart of our documentary film. The intention was always to let the juxtaposition do the heavy lifting, with voices cut against each other so precisely that the film plays like an ongoing exchange. Conversing past and around each other, yet every so often, and ultimately, they'd land in the same place without realising it.

By giving space to personal stories of both artists, we wanted In Passing to transform an intricate societal matter into something utterly human. Where challenges, empathy, and reflection merely coexist.

Optics and Design

(Visuals)

Rather than defaulting to the familiar grammar of graffiti docos, we said no to aggressive energy and shaky cam for our own sake. What's the real difference between a piece of street art and one hung in a gallery, only to be stared at in complete silence? Definitely not more noise.

Composure. Texture. Scale. Negative space. A mix of static and fluid handheld. Deliberate motion. Classical music. Four-by-three. Either it's a mess, or it's everything. And that felt like the more honest way to treat a subculture far too often flattened into spectacle.

In pushing back against the conventions of its own genre, we also ended up mirroring the philosophies of the very artists it portrays. Graffiti writers push back against who controls public space. Muralists reframe what art on a wall can mean. We refused the expected and insisted on our own terms. Did that come back to bite us? Yep, but I digress.

And a lot of the most crucial shots came from simply going out and getting it. We hit the Inner West alleyways with the instincts of street photographers, treating every frame like it mattered way too much. Because for a film this well-thought-out, it does.

From all of it, what we got is a documentary that holds together, narratively and visually, in ways that I know we left nothing to chance. That is to say, earned.

In Passing is a calm film about a rough subculture, and that contrast is, ultimately, our only thesis. It doesn't attempt to sort out the tensions it surfaces. It allows the artists to speak with full complexity, trusts the audience to sense the friction between their worldviews, and finds its meaning in the space between them.

For a student production built on a tight schedule and tighter resources (and occasionally booze), ours is a piece of work the whole team is genuinely proud of. It's unapologetically us. In a genre that wears its chaos like a badge, and yes, I'm looking at you too, documentary film-making, creating something this considered feels like a statement in itself.

"I love the opening and its soundtrack so much, and the overall texture (or vibe?) is so great. It doesn't look like a uni project. It's such professional work."
Eric Zhang
Graphic Designer
Master of Creative Industries
"Excellent work in terms of structure, coherence, creative choices, and construction of meaning, sophisticated in conveying characters, ideas, and story."
Kush Badhwar
Artist and Film-Maker
Lecturer @ Macquarie University
"It's so good. The title is also really nice. We always pass the graffiti, but the documentary brings those artists to light, which is great."
Jennifer Devaney
Master of Creative Industries
Master of Management
"It's good. I like the edit, the shots, the colour, how it's soft, and the way you've led the narrative for the whole thing."
Anindit Shrestha
Digital Media Specialist
Master of Creative Industries
"Honestly, it's such an interesting topic to even think of doing, but also creative. Love the quality!"
Norah Almarshad
Postgrad @ Macquarie University
"It looks so good anyway. We could only do so much!"
(Sorry, Georgia.)
Georgia Wood
Master of Creative Industries

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II. The Process

But first, let's meet the team:

Director & Editor

Edward Dang

Sound

Nirvan De Zylva

Producer & Writer

Georgia Wood

Production Assistant

Sylvia Ontieri

Cinematographer

Jon-Hin Tan

Assistant Producer

Minh Le

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