Held at the New Zealand Community Trust Mediatheatre, New Zealand Film Archive. 7:00pm - 9:30pm, Thursday 30 August 2007.
Digital Discussion for Desktop Cinema
Everything you ever wanted to know about digital film making. Come and hear our digital feature film makers discuss the making of digital features, directing actors, applying for funds, the advantages and disadvantages of the medium and how to get digital features screened here and internationally.
Panellists include: Campbell Walker, Colin Hodson, Lauren Jackson, Stephen Kang, Dane Giraud. Filmmaker biographies follow:
Campbell Walker a Wellington independent film maker who has made 3 features, Uncomfortable Comfortable, Why Can't I Stop This Uncontrollable Dancing and Little Bits of Light, and worked on various other digital features. Campbell is a founding member of the wholly fictitious "Aro Valley movement" of film making, and likes to make work about uncomfortable relationships. He continues to make them with no money and rising personal debt, and oscillates wildly between alarming enthusiasm and grumpy despair for the whole idea of trying to make and screen digital features in any way whatsoever.
Colin Hodson (director .ON.) Colin Hodson is currently developing a feature film script after spending a year at the Binger Filmlab, Amsterdam. Colin's first digital feature, Shifter (2000), was described by the Vancouver International Film Festival as "a self-contained slice of in medias res existence, capturing the spaces in-between with unpolished exactitude". His next improvised feature continued the exploration of these personal narratives. The Capital Times noted it for "capturing performances of such uninflected realism it is hard to believe that the film is fiction, and that we are not watching a documentary". Revisiting this film in 2006, Hodson re-edited Off into a 60 minute feature, .ON.
Lauren Jackson (actor: 1nite) Lauren trained as an actor at Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School. Lauren’s involvement with New Zealand film began with the feature film Alex in 1992. Since then Lauren has appeared in two digital features: 1nite and Futile Attraction, and will soon appear in features The Tattooist and Perfect Creature. Lauren also works in theatre as an actor and playwright.
Stephen Kang (director: {dream}preserved) Born in Seoul, Korea. Stephen moved to New Zealand in 1993. He studied video art, performance and time based art and earned BFA at the Elam, school of Art in Auckland University and produced and directed number of experimental videos and short films while studying there. His first digital feature, {dream}preserved, which he wrote and directed, won best digital feature at the 2006 Air New Zealand Screen Awards and 2006 Overseas Koreans Independent Competition.
Dane Giraud (director: Luella Miller) Dane trained as an actor at the Unitec performing Arts School under the late Murray Hutchinson. He is an actor’s director and is about ‘performance’. Dane is currently prepping a documentary that will take him halfway around the world. He is also working on two feature scripts, one of which is an ultra violent horror film. He wants to make a Western and says, “I think Westerns and Horrors are the perfect vehicle for a man to explore his sexuality and potential for violence.”