LAB MENTORS
CLEA FROST - PROGRAM DIRECTOR
A VCA graduate, Clea has worked in Australia and the US as a script coordinator, script editor, screenwriter and development executive. From 2008-13 she was the Executive Director of the Los Angeles-based screenwriting non-profit, The CineStory Foundation. In 2013 Clea returned to her hometown to become Manager, Script Development at Film Victoria. While there, Clea oversaw the agency's fiction slate as well as delivering a new iteration of the Catapult Concept Lab for early career writers and two workshops for its Incubator Feature Script Intensive. After leaving Film Victoria, Clea was the head writer on the VR game Earthlight. She is currently an assessor for Film Victoria, Screen Australia, Screen Territory and Screen Tasmania and sits on Film Victoria's EAC. She is also working with Melbourne games studio Hipster Whale on a narrative game project as a writer and content producer. In addition, Clea has several film, TV and online projects in various stages of development, including the short film The Visitor, which is currently in post-production.
GRANT SCICLUNA - INSTRUCTOR - INTRO TO VR
Grant Scicluna is the award-winning writer director of the feature film DOWNRIVER. After its sell out Premiere season at Melbourne International Film Festival 2015, DOWNRIVER was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its release in Australian and US cinemas. DOWNRIVER has won a slew of Best Film, Director and Performance awards. Grant's short films include HURT'S RESCUE, THE WILDING, NEON SKIN and GOLDEN GIRL. THE WILDING premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, won the world’s largest LGBT film award, the Iris Prize, and the Best Australian Short Queer Film at Melbourne Queer Film Festival. NEON SKIN won the NFSA’s Orlando Award for Best Queer Australian Short. Grant is an active member of the Australian Writers’ Guild and the Australian Director’s Guild as continues to develop a slate of feature films and new media projects. Most recently Grant has been working in the online and digital media spaces. His episode of the web series FRESH! was selected for the Los Angeles Film Festival and his VR Project 30 MINUTES OF DANGER, a narrative drama episode, played MIFF 2018. Grant is a mentor, script editor and script consultant to emerging practitioners.
Chris BAILEY - INSTRUCTOR - INTRO TO VR
Chris Bailey is an award winning Director, Motion Designer, Animator and Screenwriter with over 15 years of experience in the Film and TV industries. In 2014 he began his own production company, CBailey Film, where he has directed commercials for brands like Qantas, Volkswagen, Dan Murphy's, and Huggies. He created the acclaimed short VR story "Across" in 2017 which premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival. You can learn more about 3D animation and VR from his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/cbaileyfilm or at his website: https://www.cbaileyfilm.com
LESTER FRANCOIS - INSTRUCTOR - INTRO TO VR PRODUCTION
Lester Francois is a filmmaker working across many formats including VR. In 2018 his award winning interactive VR documentary RONE premiered at SXSW and went on to screen at Cannes NEXT, the New York International Film Festival and many more. Since making RONE Lester has made three more VR street art documentaries and was flown to South Africa to direct a series of short VR arts docs for an exhibition in Soho, London. Named a 2018 'One to Watch' by Screen Producers Australia; Lester is currently developing a slate of VR projects and has received development funding through Screen Australia and Film Victoria for his next major VR documentary “The Fun of Fear”. Lester is a 2019 Australian Directors Guild nominee and has spoken at SXSW, Future Film Festival, Real World VR and The Melbourne International Film Festival. In addition to working in VR Lester produced and directed the 2015 feature documentary GameLoading: Rise of the Indies and is currently developing a slate of TV projects across scripted comedy and factual.
Jess Paulin - INSTRUCTOR - NARRATIVE GAMES
Jess is Product and Marketing Manager at Hipster Whale. She started her career in 2008 in Germany within the browser game Free-To-Play industry before joining the Australian mobile game industry in 2012 where she worked in companies such as Apple and EA.
She is now Product and Marketing Manager at Hipster Whale, the Melbourne Studio which has more than 250 million downloads across their games Crossy Road, PAC-MAN 256, Disney Crossy Road and Piffle.
BEN MCKENZIE - INSTRUCTOR - NARRATIVE GAMES
Ben is lead game designer (or “Games Mechanic”) at Melbourne’s premiere live games company, Pop Up Playground. He has designed dozens of games for and with the company, including Spy Catcher, The Curse, #TrueRomansAll (commissioned by Bell Shakespeare’s Mind’s Eye program), 1000 Cities (for City of Melbourne), The Ride and their first “elsewhere room” project, the immersive bank heist adventure Small Time Criminals, set in a real two-storey bank building.
Prior to Pop Up Playground, Ben created several improvised comedy formats, including Set List (with Karin Muiznieks and Daniel Walmsley), Macguffin (with Sean Fabri) and Dungeon Crawl (with Richard McKenzie). He’s also worked on the Freeplay Independent Games Festival since 2011, and spoken on panels at both Freeplay and PAX Australia. He occasionally writes about games at Losing An Eye on Medium, and on the Pop Up Playground blog.
In 2012, Ben contributed to Magpie Games’ Our Last Best Hope, a storytelling game of heroic sacrifice and humanity-threatening disaster. Ben has also worked with Melbourne-based Tin Man Games as a writer and designer on the virtual reality videogame Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown which was released on PlayStation VR.
Alexander swords - instructor - storytelling for games
Alexander is a narrative designer with a background in audience development and arts management. He's worked for indies in Berlin, AAA in Sweden, and is now based in Australia helping studios forge strong relationships with their audiences through narrative systems and player care. Along the way he's re-engineered the sequence method for screenplay writing to develop robust models of narrative design across game genres, and pushed for better ways of understanding player motivation beyond demographics and traditional models.
ben scerri - instructor - storytelling for games
Ben Scerri is a video game writer and designer from Melbourne. He's been involved with organising, running, and writing of tabletop and live-action roleplaying games since he was six years old, and is passionate about sharing knowledge between the tabletop-, video-, and live-action industries.
MARK MORRISON - INSTRUCTOR - STORYTELLING FOR GAMES
Mark Morrison has been writing stories and designing mechanics for tabletop roleplaying games and computer games for 30+ years. He has worked for Chaosium, Infogrames, Atari, BlueTongue THQ, Robot Circus, the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, and more. His most recent credits include dialogue for the science fiction mobile game Ticket to Earth (Robot Circus), the French Revolution RPG book Reign of Terror (Chaosium), and storyline for the forthcoming Call of Cthulhu computer game (Focus Home Interactive). He also teaches Writing for Interactive Narrative at Swinburne University.