When I was studying screenwriting, I made about ten short films. I think it was five times as many as anyone else in the course but I felt I couldn’t assess my screenwriting properly if I didn’t see it on the screen. I teamed up with the audio-visual students who had to do a short-film project and we had a lot of fun – and learned a lot. It’s a sobering experience to be sitting in the edit suite as redundant dialogue that took hours to shoot hits the cutting room floor.’
— GCS
The Last Bottle
I’d written this short screenplay about an old man drinking wine of his birth year and it was a finalist in the Jamieson Short Film competition, but didn’t win the prize of a free production. So I made it anyway with the audio-visual students and Beth Child directing and the legendary Bud Tingwell graciously took the lead role. Which made it easier to get Genevieve Picot to co-star! It was the last film Bud Tingwell made, and no doubt partly because of that, it was shown multiple times on Australian ABC television.’
— GCS
I did everything on this little doco except the final edit (Bec Peniston Bird did that) and the sound cleanup when it was accepted for Bondi Film Festival. So the camera and lighting work is a bit basic, but I wanted to get in close to my subject, who I know well, on a very personal subject. Rod was the original inspiration for The Rosie Project, though story and character changed a lot over the five years I spent writing it.
— GCS
