Our Rāroa team won the Best VFX award for 2020. This was one of 5 awards given out to the top 10 teams, from a pool of High School and Intermediate teams.

VFX stands for Visual Effects, and it’s a fantastic award to win because it celebrates each aspect of the filmmaking process. 

Starting with the script, penned by Scarlett Ashington, Hannah Wharehinga and Alex Anderson, which set up the concept of parallel stories in the real world and the game world. Matias Colon-Rivera and Iris Polaschek provided the technical camerawork; framing shots, tracking movement and keeping focus, across many different filming locations and lighting confiscations. Our actors; Georgie Farley, Finn Moriarty, Sophie Wembridge, Lexi Brotherson, Katharine Muller & Alex Anderson, were fantastic on set AND were able to re-record all of their lines matching the cadence and speed of their on set performance for ADR. 

Finally, Finn Fraser was our chief Editor, successively cutting down 12 minutes of filmed story to under 5 minutes, and upskilling with Adobe After Effects to provide some post production effects.

As you can probably tell, I am especially proud of the team’s effort and really stoked with the recognition too. At some point in the future we’ll be touring the Weta Companies in Miramar which is a very exciting prize.

Thanks again for your support throughout this process; it’s been a weird year to be making films.