Speakers at Showcase Foyle Film Festival 2010
Adam Gee: Channel4
Commissioning Editor - Cross-platform (Factual & Arts)
Adam is one of the most experienced commissioners in UK broadcasting of multiplatform interactive projects around TV. Recent projects range from One Born Every Minute to Seven Days, from Sexperience to Big Art Mob, from EmbarrassingBodies to Landshare, from Quotables to 4Thought.tv.
Adam has won over 60 international awards for his productions - including three BAFTAs, three RTS Awards, two Media Guardian Innovation Awards and the Grand Award at the New York International Film & TV Festival.
Adam has served on BAFTA’s Television and Interactive Entertainment committees and is a voting member of the European Film Academy. He is a trustee of Culture24.
Gawain Morrison: Filmtrip
Over the last 14 years Gawain has been involved in events promotion across Europe, for music, fashion, film and media. He has produced over 30 live action and animated short films and music promos, as well as teaching production as part of NI Screen’s Digital Shorts scheme. He steers the good ship Filmtrip & conceptualises Filmtrip Productions.
Alex Hryniewicz: Maverick TV
Alex has worked as a Producer across various online projects for Maverick Television including Jamie at Home; How to Look Good Naked and 10 Years Younger; as well as developing and managing the online video, technical and content teams for Embarrassing Bodies Online. He developed the brand throughout 2008 and 2009, including spin-offs such as Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, and picked up the Interactivity Bafta for his work at the 2009 Bafta Television Awards.
His other recent work includes producing Gastronuts for the CBBC website; working on the Golden Tweet award winning Generation Kill Twitter feed, and developing Embarrassing Bodies: Live, the UK’s first interactive web turnover show, where the viewers are able to vote which questions are asked, which photos are examined, and which topics are discussed in the studio. This show won Best Creative Contribution at the 2010 Bafta TV Craft Awards.
Niall Harbison: Simply Zesty / Food Mob
Niall co-founded Ireland’s first social media agency Simply Zesty which looks after strategy for brands like Vodafone, Nokia and Sony in England and Ireland. The company has grown to 15 people within 16 months. Niall has also produced over 1000 online videos with over 5 million views including an award winning cookery show in Revision3 the American internet TV station. Niall also writes on popular social media blog The Next Web and thinks social media is changing businesses and whole industries in front of our eyes.
Pete Kerr: Atto
Pete Kerr is one third of Atto, a Responsible Design Partnership based in Belfast. Atto help great businesses and organisations get even better using design thinking (and do-ing) to achieve real goals, like turning casual website users into life-long fans. Pete recently led the design of the 4thought.tv website.
David Meade
From BBC’s exciting new format “The David Meade Project”, David Meade is one of the UK’s most sought after speakers and entertainers. Combining skills of suggestion, psychology, and body language interpretation, David has been invited to perform, speak, and entertain at professional engagements throughout the world. Meade has just returned from the USA where he packed out houses and was invited as a special guest to address the Harvard Faculty and is currently planning for the launch of the television series, which was produced by Wild Rover Productions (Belfast). Outside of performance, Meade is an award winning academic based at the University of Ulster.
Catherine Ross: 360 Production
Producer / Director Catherine Ross graduated from the world renowned BBC Production Trainee Scheme, and has an award-winning track record. Previous BBC credits include Tomorrow’s World, Blue Peter, Comic Relief and BBC America in Washington DC. Most recently, she self-shot an observational documentary for ITV / PBS, which followed three singing Priests and their journey to a £1 million deal with Sony.
Having recently returned to her hometown of Derry, her landmark CGI series for National Geographic had its debut in September.
Stephen O’Regan: Balcony TV
Stephen is one of the co-founders of BalconyTV, a leading daily online viral music show that features bands, musicians and other variety acts on balconies around the world. It has notched up over 15 million video views and has now expanded to include over a dozen cities across the globe.
Peter ‘Magic’ Johnston: MediaZoo Studios & 15 Second Film Festival Founder
Peter is the founder of MediaZoo Studios, a “space to create - Film & CGI / Theatre / Photography / New-Media Workshops” and home to the 15 Second Film Festival, which “delivers a carefully curated programme of eye-popping, lip-smacking, brain-tickling quarter-minute masterpieces”. The festival tours all year round in a two-seater itinerant Art-Deco Picture Palace.
Jim Murray: Co-founder, Troll Inc
Jim Murray co-founded the recently formed games company Troll Inc. Troll produce video games for emerging mobile markets and in particular the Apple mobile family. Their first game - and one they are currently developing - is Jellyflug in a video game designed for children 7 and above based on the world of microorganisms. Through gameplay the user will learn the amazing way microorganisms work, interact with each other and what affect they have on our world.
Stuart Johnston: Johnston North
Stuart Johnston runs Johnston North - a web development studio that helps organisations create innovative and interesting websites. Stuart has a strong focus on building intuitive, people-friendly applications and recently has been working with Channel 4 to launch the new 4thought.tv website.
George Clarke: Yellow Fever
Writer, producer, director, fight choreographer and original star of ‘Battle Of The Bone’, George Clarke is the brainchild behind this film and his company Yellow Fever Productions. Born in East Belfast in 1977, George spent his teenage years living in the countryside and up the Antrim Coast - still his favourite place to this very day.
For over 20 years now, George’s love for film lies in Asian cinema, something that will never change. And with a personal collection of over 2500 Hong Kong, Japanese, Korean and Thai flicks, an obvious payback for inspiration will always be evident in what he makes. George’s number one hero and visual teacher is Jackie Chan, yet he says each and every major HK star has helped make him who he is today.
Eva Hanser: University of Ulster (Magee)
Eva Hanser is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Ulster, Magee. Her Ph.D. project entitled, “SceneMaker: intelligent multimodal visualisation of screenplays”, supervised by Prof. Paul Mc Kevitt, Dr. T. Lunney & Dr. J. Condell, includes the development of SceneMaker, a (mobile) software prototype for automatically producing 3D multimodal animations from screenplays with a particular focus on emotions, music, spoken dialogue, illumination, cinematography and timing to support different moods and genres from various points of view. SceneMaker will produce scenes in real-time on-set and enable their viewing and editing by film directors, actors/actresses, film crew and even screenwriters. Applications of SceneMaker also include education and advertising. Eva is from Dusseldorf, Germany, has a Dip. in Design from FH Augsburg, Germany (2005) and an M.Sc. in Computing & Design from The University of Ulster (2006).
Yogarajah Pratheepan: University of Ulster (Magee)
Yogarajah Pratheepan is a research associate in Computer Science at the University of Ulster, Magee. He is employed on an Invest NI Proof-of-Concept commercialisation project focussed on digital steganography, which is the process of hiding a message in an appropriate carrier, for example an image or audio file. The carrier can then be sent to a receiver without anyone knowing that the hidden message exists i.e. for digital watermaking of video for film, TV and computer games to facilitate authentication and secure transmission. The work has secured two UK and international patents, winning the NISP 25K awards hi-tech category award, 2009 and Proof of Principle funding from the University of Ulster Office of Innovation.
Liam McGarry: WeeMan Studios
Liam is co-founder of Wee Man Studios, Northern Ireland’s best and brightest 3D mobile game developer. Wee Man Studios developed a pioneering games engine, as well as the critically acclaimed Galactic Racer, (previewed by PocketGamer.co.uk as one of the Top 10 most anticipated iPhone games).
