I drive past the Otway Road train bridge daily, and one morning saw artist Jimmi Buscombe drawing on the side of the bridge.

The picture was of a wombat crawling out of a hole in the wall and it was fantastic!

It looked to me like the mural had been done with chalk, so when months later it was still there, and Jimmi popped into our local radio studio for another reason, I pulled him aside.

"I was curious to know why the wombat hadn't washed off the wall.

"Well…," said Jimmi, with a twinkle in his eye. "Funny story."

He then told me the incredible series of events that led to the wombat mural becoming permanent.

I thought it was the funniest, small-community story I'd heard — a slice of kooky country town life — and I knew I had to make a video about it.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 4 minutes 53 seconds 4 m 53 s Warrnambool's popular wombat mural a happy accident ( Emily Bissland )

I had a very full plate, so I asked Jimmi to hold off telling anyone else the story for a month or so.

"Sure!" he said laughing. "The wombat's not going anywhere."

It actually took me a few months to make time for it but in the back of my mind how to tell the story was percolating.

I wanted to show the lovely neighbourhood relationships that can develop between different people living side-by-side who somehow find a way to connect but I was wrestling with the best way to capture that comedic gold.

A 'dodgy' re-enactment

Initially, I couldn't work out how to tell this story because it had all happened in the past, and just having talking heads would be boring for any visual platform, but especially for a Facebook video.

Then I realised that this was the perfect, and possibly only, opportunity I would ever have as a journalist to make a 'dodgy' re-enactment.

That made me laugh, could I really get a 'dodgy' re-enactment into an ABC story?

I suddenly had a ridiculous new career goal!

On the day of the shoot, I said to Jimmi and Phil Hoy: "let's make a dodgy re-enactment" to encourage light-heartedness and some hammy acting.

Artist Jimmi Buscombe and former graffiti removalist Phil Hoy. ( ABC South West Victoria: Matt Neal )

The pre-interview, the storyboard and the shoot

No matter how short your pre-interview is, or how scribbled your storyboard, shooting script or question list is, in my experience doing these things always improve any content.

For this video, I did phone interviews about a week before the shoot and jotted down some choice quotes from each bloke.

These quotes became kind of 'gags' or essential storyline points.

I drafted questions by working backwards from the quotes.

Before running out the door to the shoot, I sat down and drew up a very rough storyboard/shooting script.

A page of Emily Bissland's storyboard which she used to plan the shoot. ( ABC News: Emily Blissland )

That process is essential for me — it only takes 10 minutes and allows me to fully concentrate on one idea at a time, throw out terrible ideas that have been swimming around my brain, and come up with better, new ideas.



Having that piece of paper in my back pocket (literally) ensures that when I am on location, I get the essential storytelling shots and also have the mental space and confidence to look around for opportunistic shots, like the shot of Jimmi watching the train go past — I didn't plan that, but saw the opportunity on arrival at his house.

Both men gave incredible interviews and performances and I was laughing throughout.

When interviewing Phil I was shaking as I tried to keep the sound in, then once Phil had stopped laughing himself and I knew I had the 'golden moment', I let myself just cackle out loud.

Maybe me laughing along with them helped Phil and Jimmi to really go for it with their storytelling.

I think that it's important to be really present in an interview — to have eye contact, listen and respond like in a regular conversation — and I try not to look down at my questions until my interviewee has stopped talking.

Phil Hoy delivered a highly entertaining performance in the video. ( ABC News )

Phil's unique fashion style

A lot of people have asked me about Phil's hat and clothes.

Phil is a house painter and he wears that hat because he gets really cold (Warrnambool, on Victoria's south coast, can be quite chilly).

He asked me if he should take the hat off during filming and, obviously, I encouraged him to leave it on.

The day of the shoot was the first time I met Phil and I was just delighted.

I found him to be a larrikin, very natural, and good-hearted and he was also full of surprises, particularly his absolute love of Jimmi's wombat and respect for Jimmi's artistic talent and I really wanted that to come through in the video.

Emily Bissland shooting the wombat mural which has now become a local tourist attraction. ( ABC News: Matt Neal )

Getting the comedy right

I shot the video with a DSLR with a mounted camera mic, switching between two different lenses, and mostly using a tripod as well as shooting a little bit 'hand-held'.

For the interviews, I used the same camera set-up but also recorded audio on a digital audio recorder, using a radio lapel mic and later synced the vision and audio in the Premiere Pro editing program.

I did spend a little longer in the edit trying to nail the comedic timing, and trying to get to the funny bit as early as I could, so that I wouldn't lose my audience in those crucial first 10 seconds.

If I had a locked in cinema audience, I could have drawn things out a little longer, but in the world of Facebook you do have to make videos 'top-heavy' — lead with the strongest footage — get to the good bit before the scrolling thumbs attack!

I was looking for the key storytelling elements (the what happened when) but also for the best 'performances', those moments when each of the blokes just cracked up, or said something hilarious.

I was hyper-aware of not labouring a point, not telling the joke and then explaining why it's funny, of keeping things moving fast, using efficient storytelling techniques, and giving my audience the benefit of the doubt that they could keep up.



It wasn't until I got pretty deep into the edit that I realised the wombat was the third character in this story — it inspired acts of civil disobedience and a beautiful friendship — so I used close-up shots of it as transitions in the film to focus on its starring role.

The mural was covered with an automotive clear coat. ( ABC South West Victoria: Matt Neal )

Going viral

Watching this video go viral was the most beautiful, insane thing.

It felt like I was a bottle of mineral water and someone shook me up.

It's such a happy, silly story and it's so hyper-local.

I didn't dream it would have millions of views, but I had a very strong feeling that people would connect with it — the story felt somehow essentially Australian.

I still don't know exactly why it resonated but I think it has something to do with the civil disobedience, the humour, Phil as a character, and an unlikely friendship.

I knew Warrnambool would think it was 'gutsy as' and would love it.

I told Jimmi we could expect to get a minimum of 30,000 views on our local ABC South West Victorian Facebook page, and if it got shared by a flagship ABC page, maybe we could reach 90,000.

I'm not sure what exactly happened, but from the minute I posted the video at 7.30pm something felt different — within minutes it had a couple of 'loves' and 'shares'.

That made me stop and think 'huh?'

I packed my car and hit the highway to Melbourne on a week's leave and when I stopped about an hour later for petrol, I checked Facebook again.

At that point the video had already had about 30,000 views and hundreds of comments and shares — that was all of Warrnambool in a few hours! Boom!.

I woke the next morning to find the video already had 200,000 views and that was just on our local page.

Then the rest of the ABC discovered it, and began cross-posting to flagship pages.

It was incredible to watch the numbers soar, and I loved seeing all the happy, positive comments.

It hit 1 million on the first day and has pretty much gained a million Facebook views each day since then, and at the time of writing it's on 24 million views.

Phil, Jimmi and I had a few incredulous phone calls along the way and about a fortnight after posting the video, Jimmi threw a wombat party where we all celebrated.

It was heart-warming to see so many people say how much they loved Phil, how much they loved Jimmi's wombat, how funny the story was, and how it got them out of a bad mood.

A lot of people commented that it made them 'proud to be Australian' or was 'typically Aussie' — that was interesting.

There are often international tourists who now stop and take a selfie with the wombat.

Jimmi has had a lot more interest in his artwork and Phil has had to close his garage door for the first time ever because of too many friendly 'drop-ins'.

Warrnambool's Phil Hoy decided the wombat mural needed to stay, and so took it upon himself to make that happen. ( ABC South West Victoria: Emily Bissland )

The power of Facebook

I have some concerns about social media and, in my opinion, Facebook can be a fraught platform.

It's incredibly powerful but when that power works in your favour, it is quite something — you can just reach SO many people SO quickly.

I don't know any other way that we can achieve that in the current media climate.

I'm glad that I didn't try to bend and squash this story to be 'Facebook-optimised', if I had, it would have been under two minutes long, with mostly big text graphics covering the video images and telling the story.

Instead, I made a five-minute video with lots of talking and no text graphics.

Some of the viewers only got three seconds through it, but many people have watched it more than once, some people have told me they watched it five times, or watch it every morning so they begin the day in a good mood.

I'm not saying that we should throw away everything we know about how our audiences digest media, but I do think some stories need to be told differently, and our audiences are prepared to receive some stories differently.

An audience for good news

All of this happening has validated something I live by as a content maker, and sometimes feel foolish for saying in a newsroom: I believe in the importance of telling positive stories.

There is a lot of sad, terrible, unbelievable, bad news in the world and, while it must be reported, I think people need to also be constantly reminded of our capacity for 'goodness' and desire for 'happiness'.