Ōtepoti / Dunedin
City Manager
Your Ōtepoti / Dunedin City Manager and is Miguel Weaver.
Miguel Weaver
Miguel is your friendly Otago/Southland area manager. With a wealth of short film, music video, promotional video, and feature films credits, 12 years of running festivals, and over a decade in the circus world, he has a broad range of expertise to call on.
Contacts
Email Miguel
Call Miguel - 027 694 2401
Heats
All heats in 2024 will be screened online so teams can watch all entries.
Dunedin City Finals
Date / time - Monday 1st July, 7pm
Venue - Rialto Cinema, 11 Moray Place, Central Dunedin
Judges
Jaimee Poipoi
Jaimee (Ngāti Kahungunu/Ngā Puni) has 10+ years of film and television experience working on local projects like Red, White and Brass (2023) to international tent pole films like the next Avatar movies (2022 & 2024).
Once described as a creative swiss-army knife, she created/directed the RNZ Investigative comedy series ConspiraSeries (2022), co-created/hosted the 70s-themed RNZ comedy podcast, The Art of Entertaining (2022), and has produced and directed many films through her company Electric Shoelace Productions, that have screened in national and international festivals – most recently the animated short films Who Sneezed and Star Sailors (as Director), and the NZFC Fresh Short film Hey, Brainy Man (as Producer) which won the 2023 NZIFF Patrons Award for Best Short Film
In 2022 she was awarded a special grant in the NZFC Gender Scholarship, recognising the work of Emerging Wahine Producers, and is 1 of 6 Directors in the 2023 DEGANZ Emerging Women in Filmmakers Incubator. Naturally drawn to unique and interesting stories, Jaimee aims to use her wide range of skills to create content with a focus on diverse people, through a comedic lens.
Oana Jones
Oana Jones is a Director, Producer and Science Communicator. Her work includes VR and Fulldome, animated shorts, documentary filmmaking and science communication. Her work has been featured in Planetariums, galleries, virtual reality, augmented reality and even onto buildings for the Dunedin Midwinter Carnival.
She opened and managed the Perpetual Guardian Planetarium in Dunedin’s Otago Museum for almost seven years and in that time has developed seven planetarium films, contributed to four funded digital exhibitions and created dozens of museum programmes. Currently she’s a lecturer in Game Art and Animation at the University of Canterbury and her research explores immersive film and exhibition design and the intersection between digital and physical interaction.
Bex Rowe
Bex’ first introduction to Film and Television was was in 2002 studying screenwriting in Melbourne. Twenty two years on Bex’ work history spans over several sectors for both Domestic and International projects under the roles of Production, Post Production, Casting, Script Coordinating, Assistant Directing, Publicity & Art Department.
Some local projects include One Winter, The Rehearsal & Wellington Paranormal as well as International productions such as; King Kong, Avatar, Spartacus & The Power of the Dog.
Since returning to her hometown Dunedin in 2019, Bex is an active Film Otago Southland Board Member, consults for DCC around crew capacity, infrastructure and studio potential and is a regular contributor as Dunedin representative for the NZ Tech Guild magazine.
Stefan Roesch
Stefan Roesch has nearly 20 years of experience in market research and is a leading expert on film tourism. In 2003, he emigrated to New Zealand to embark on the world’s first PhD in Film Tourism at the University of Otago. He has consulted various destinations on film tourism projects around the world, including the likes of VisitBritain on the movie PADDINGTON and Tourism Northern Ireland on GAME OF THRONES.
To date, Stefan has produced three award-winning short films – two in Germany and one in New Zealand. In October 2023, Stefan was awarded the designation of Certified Film Commissioner (CFC), having successfully completed the Master Class Programme run by the Association of Film Commissioners International (AFCI). Stefan has also recently been elected on the AFCI Board of Directors. The two year term for newly elected board members will begin in January 2024.