Richard Driver investigates late 80s campus radio for music show RWP, and finds stations that have outgrown modest beginnings. They have longer broadcast hours, a national co-ordinator (former Netherworld Dancing Toy Graham Cockcroft) and a profile in the industry. Further positives include their own style (a certain informality in presentation, perceived as a plus by many) and a commitment to alternative music and local talent. But there are also concerns about estrangement from student associations, and commercial success breeding advertiser pressures.

Nature documentary A Flock of Students captures footage of a species rarely caught on camera: a colony of young human 'freshers' who have migrated south to Dunedin. Over footage of nesting, university pie-eating contests and social gatherings, narrator Sydney Jackson provides insights into student display rituals, social groupings and early, "somewhat unfocused" attempts at courtship. As winter bites, temperatures fall below zero, and the male of the species builds up resistance by exposing itself to all available germs. David Kilgour (The Clean) provides the music.

NZ On Screen’s Dunedin Collection offers up the sights and sounds of a city edged by ocean, and famed for its music. Dunedin is a bracing mixture of old and new: of Victorian buildings and waves of fresh-faced students, many of them carrying guitars. As Dave Cull reflects in his introduction, it is a city where distance is no barrier to creativity and innovation.

Hello Sailor's time in the sun saw them spending time in Ponsonby, LA and Sydney, becoming a legendary live act, and releasing an iconic debut album. This collection features documentary Sailor's Voyage, founder member Harry Lyon's account of the birth of the band, and tracks from Hello Sailor, both together and apart. Some of the solo songs were incorporated into the group's live set after they reunited. Included are 'Blue Lady', 'New Tattoo' and 'Gutter Black’, later reborn on TV's Outrageous Fortune.

Animated plasticine. Talking chickens. Dancing Cossacks. Plus old favourites bro'Town, Hairy Maclary and Footrot Flats. From Len Lye to Gollum, feast on the talents of Kiwi animators. In his backgrounder to the Animation Collection, NZ On Screen's Ian Pryor provides handy pathways through the frogs, dogs and stop motion shenanigans. 

This collection celebrates Kiwi comedy on TV: the caricatures, piss-takes, and sitcoms that have cracked us up, and pulled the wool over our eyes for over five decades. From turkeys in gumboots and Fred Dagg, to Billy T, bro'Town and Jaquie Brown. As Diana Wichtel reflects, watching the evolution of native telly laughs is, "a rich and ridiculous, if often painful, pleasure." 

Jock Phillips begins his journey through our Waitangi collection by recalling an awkward encounter with a security guard at the treaty grounds. Wandering 50 years between the first film in this collection and the last, Phillips explores changing attitudes to the Treaty. Discover everything from Mike King on the treaty trail, to trench warfare, waka-building and epic drama.

Geoff Murphy was the trumpet player who got Kiwis yelling in the movie aisles. His 1981 road movie Goodbye Pork Pie was the first big hit of the Kiwi film renaissance. He completed an impressive triple punch with the epic Utu, and Bruno Lawrence alone on earth classic The Quiet Earth. From early student heists to Edgar Allen Poe, this collection pays tribute to the late, great, laconic wild man of Kiwi film. Plus read background pieces written in 2013 by cinematographer Alun Bollinger, friend Roger Donaldson, writer Dominic Corry and early partner in crime Derek Morton.

The Italian Job meets cheap jugs and a student union gig in this early heist tale from Geoff Murphy (Goodbye Pork Pie). The plot follows some university students — short on exam fees and beer money — and their scheme to crack a campus safe. Murphy enlisted $4000 and a bevy of mates (including Bruno Lawrence in one of his earliest screen roles), and made it over nine months of weekends. It sold to local television (as well as the ABC in Australia). Its deliberately low key, naturalistic acting stood in stark contrast to the stage-influenced television dramas of the time.

This six-part Māori Television series documents the experiences of six Māori language students from around the country, on a three-week cultural field trip to Beijing, China. The teenagers take their own cameras to record their experiences. They attend a local high school, live with Chinese families, and take in the local sites and sounds. The series is in Te Reo Māori, with English sub-titles. In this episode, the students learn how to get around Beijing using the local transport, they visit schools and find out about calligraphy, and they tour Beijing’s legendary Forbidden City.