MEDIA NEWS

We have had a great start to the year in the TAFE Film & TV department with some really informative and hands on workshops with Cinematographer Matt Wood. Matt ran a workshop giving students experience in shooting with the Red Epic Digital Cinema camera and brought in some amazing Hawk anamorphic lenses for the students to try out.  Matt has years of experience in cinematography including shooting music videos for musicians such as Courtney Barnett, Paul Kelly, You am I and Eskimo Joe and was a great source of information for the students.

This year we have Film Director Keiran Watson-Bonnice from Red Lodge Films with us two days a week teaching Cinematography and Sound Design in the Screen Practice class.  Keiran’s award winning short film Caravan has been screened in competition in film festivals all over the world and can now be seen online through ABC iView.   Keiran will provide students with invaluable insight into what goes into making a great short film.

Richard Wolstencroft director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival joined us in Film Industry Studies to talk about MUFF, Networking and all things film. Richard has been running Melbourne Underground Film Festival for the last seventeen years and provided students with substantial information about getting their films off their hard drives and out into festivals.  Richard was keen to collaborate with us to run a special Footscray City Films program at Melbourne Underground 2017 which is incredibly exciting. 

We have a green screen!  After much planning and hard work our chroma key green screen is almost complete in the TV Studio, we are just waiting on the floor to be delivered. Chroma Key is a digital technique by which a block of a particular colour, in this case green, in a film or video image can be replaced by another colour or image, the most basic example is when a weather forecaster appears against a background of a computer-generated weather map, however we hope to use it in far more creative ways than that - think more Star Wars and less Mike Larkan.  Many thanks to Paul O'Halloran for helping us put it all together; he did an amazing job and we can’t wait to start using it!

On Thursday March 9th female graduates from Footscray City Films took part in a special International Women’s Day event run By Women in Film & Television Victoria (WIFT) at Backlot Studios.  Our graduates showcased their recent film productions and afterwards took part in a panel discussion about making films in a fairly male dominated industry.  Our graduates spoke very highly of the courses at Footscray City Films and we are very proud of everything they have achieved since graduating.

It has been a busy but productive start and from now until the end of term staff and students are preparing for the ‘4 Hour Shoots’ - a week where each student has 4 hours to shoot a film located in and around the school grounds.  Each student directs their own film and when they are not directing they act as crew members for their fellow students productions.  It is a hectic week with a steep learning curve but is always an enjoyable and valuable learning experience.

Film & TV Staff