About

As with many lives and industries, the pandemic turned the world of screen production upside-down with almost all projects screeching to a sudden halt. Sue Swinburne, documentary filmmaker and Program Director of the Masters of Screen Production, Griffith University, leads a discussion with a panel of Queensland-based filmmakers who remarkably used the pandemic as inspiration to create new work, innovate new ways of shooting and respond to the new landscape of distribution. Sue is joined by Meg O’Connell of Unless Pictures who created the ABC Comedy Retrograde in response to the lockdown, Loani Arman of Mama Bear Productions whose ABC Factual series My Body Says was commissioned and shot through the pandemic, Nadine Bates, Co-Founder and CEO of Like A Photon Creative, whose new animated feature Combat Wombat is navigating a new covid-influenced release schedule and Mary Duong whose SBS docuseries Bananas was selected for high profile United States film festival SXSW which had to be cancelled due to the virus spread. The panel discusses new ways of working and looks to the future of film production asking the question what does the new normal look like for festivals, filmmaking and beyond?