VIDEO: Update from Willie Rowe | April

https://youtu.be/r5YanoKidNU

The latest Screenwest and WA Screen Industry news from Screenwest CEO Willie Rowe.

Video Transcript

Welcome everyone to the update on Screenwest and the WA Screen Industry’s activities in April. There’s a lot going on and it’s pretty quite exciting for us here.

First of all I’d like to talk a little bit about Film Friendly, which we launched a couple of weeks ago.

This is an initiative that showcases Western Australia and encourages regional councils, regional authorities and generally anyone in WA to be film friendly. We’re conducting a number of workshops which are coming up in May and those workshops will show local government authorities what they can do to encourage filming and films to be made in their regions or in their areas.

We also held a comedy night recently which was highly successful.

We had the head of the ABC’s comedy Rick Kalowski who was in Perth for a few days and that was a fantastic workshop. We had about 90 interested people coming to that to learn about comedy and how to pitch comedy into making a series, or whatever that might be in terms of comedy. For those that couldn’t attend, we recorded an episode of our podcast and that’s Rick talking about commissioning comedies and what they need to do become those very successful comedy writers. So, I’d encourage you to go to our website www.screenwest.com.au/podcast.

We’ve also launched a beta-test for a user-friendly WA Screen Industry Calendar.

What that is, it’s a calendar that we’ve established where events that are coming up are input by anyone who’s remotely interested in the screen industry or wants to get their activities promoted and out there so we know what’s going on at any one time and what’s going on in the screen industry. It’s a really important initiative and I’d encourage you all to go online to do that and it’s www.screenwest.com.au/calendar.

Interestingly and terrifically we had KGB starting production, which is a comedy web series that’s part of the ABC/Screenwest Indigenous Online Initiative Originate.

It’s written/directed by Luke and Dan Riches and produced by Mad Kids. Devina McPherson went on set and said it was an amazing experience, and not just because they had cupcakes.

Congratulations go to a number of our WA practitioners.

I’m really excited for Lauren Elliott and Julia Hales who made the 2019 Business News 40 Under 40 list. That’s a great achievement for both Lauren and Julia and we look forward to seeing either of them becoming the 40 Under 40 champion.

Filmmaker Tyson Mowarin recently won the best short film at the Māoriland Film Festival NativeSlam film competition with his team in New Zealand, and this is a recently interesting concept. It was international teams of Indigenous filmmakers from around the world who met up in New Zealand to make a short film in 72 hours with no budget. That’s no mean achievement, particularly the no budget. That’s fantastic for Tyson and his team; it’s a great outcome.

Of course, we’ve got our very own Tania Chambers and Rikki Lea Bestall going to Los Angeles on Partner with Australia, which gives them the opportunity to meet with producers and distributors in Los Angeles. It’s hosted by Ausfilm. It’s a great opportunity for both Tania and Rikki in Los Angeles to get some really exciting international programs up and running.

Funding rounds!

Everyone’s always interested in the funding rounds that we run and we’re in the midst of panels discussions for our Documentary, Scripted and Footloose production funding rounds which closed at the end of February, so all the assessments are under way at the moment and it’s quite exciting for us to see the variety and the quality of the projects that are coming in for support.

And our West Coast Visions initiative, which has been such a great champion for first-time directors, is up again. We’ve got applications closed on Monday and we’re now going through the process of looking at those outstanding projects that are in the mix for West Coast Visions.

So, it’s been a really exciting part of, well, April, it’s just the beginning of April, with a lot more to come so I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Willie Rowe
Screenwest CEO

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