By Melissa Welsh Photos: Yanni
A
ward winning and 16 years old, filmmaker, Liam Kelly has his sights set high on cinema. Liam took out the Emerging Filmmaker Award in the Peninsula Short Film Festival for his first short film, ‘Drawn’, later winning Best Student Film and Best of Festival - Runner Up at Firereel Film Festival in California. ‘Drawn’ was also shortlisted for The Projects Short Film Festival in Sydney. Liam talks to Melissa Walsh about his new film and life as an up and coming filmmaker. How did you get involved with your new film, ‘Train Of Thought’? I met Andrea Louise Thomas at the Peninsula Short Film Festival and we began talking about perspective film ideas. She has written a poem she was performing at the Australian Poetry Slam and we decided it would be the basis of a short film. It’s a fantastic poem, which is a humanitarian observation, which touches on a lot of issues like gender divide, materialism, racism and achieving an ideal life. How do you make a poem into a short film? ‘Poets on the Fringe’ is the poem title, and ‘Train Of Thought’ is a working title, which may be changed later. The next step is to work out how to visualize the poetry which follows the story line of a performance poet with her daughter as she is growing up. How many minutes is a short film? Some festivals have micro shorts which are 15 seconds but they can be up to half an hour I think. Will ‘Train Of Thought’ be ready for the short film festival? Yes we are hoping it will be ready, and have applied for a creative funding grant from the Shire to help with post production but the problem is the funding doesn’t come through until Jan/Feb and the cut off for the festival is November. How did you get into filmmaking? I always wanted to be a musician so have been really into music, then one day dad handed me down his old camera and I filmed when my cousins came over, filming on the trampoline and doing star wars stuff. It was an old video camera which you recorded onto a dvd and then had to format it. It was through my music I got onto freeZA project, and that introduced me to Steve Bastoni, and then I did his short film workshop a couple of years ago. Then last year a friend and I did Steve’s film The Decision which was my first structured film. How did your first film evolve? ‘Drawn’ came about on the set of ‘The Decision’. They asked if I was going to enter something into the short film festival. I was actually working on something but it was too long, so decided to make ‘Drawn’. I “story boarded” it;. I envisaged two people in a world where you draw lines on a wall to meet your true love. It was something that popped into my head and the inspiration was the locks on the bridge in France. continued next page...
Spring 2015
E ssence | 45
PENINSULA