Filmmaker and newly appointed Film Ireland commissioning editor, Ross Whitaker has enjoyed much recent success which includes seeing his short documentary ‘Bye Bye Now’ scoop the audience award at the recent Silver Docs festival and having his first issue printed for distribution on July 6th. IFTN caught up with Ross to talk American audiences, driving around Ireland in search of phone box stories and bringing attention back to Film Ireland’s regular features.
The fruits of Ross Whitaker’s new role as Commissioning Editor will be revealed in the next issue of Film Ireland which will be available from July 6th. The filmmaker recently enjoyed success with his short documentary ‘Bye, Bye Now’ when it won the Audience Award at the AFI Silverdocs Festival during the last week of June. The doc, which was co-directed and co-produced by Ross and Aideen O'Sullivan, follows the planned removal of a number of phone boxes from around the country, evoking fond memories in the lives of the rural Irish communities. The making of the short called for Aideen and Ross to travel the length and breadth of the country in search of phone boxes and their stories. “We got in a car and drove around Ireland,” Ross tells us, “and we knew it would be the only way we’d find the stories. It sounds kind of ridiculous looking back on it now but you can’t tell stories sitting in offices.”
Ross found out about the Silver Doc win via e-mail as he wasn’t in attendance at the festival: “It was upsetting not to have gone over, I really would have loved to have been there to accept it.” He says “Because it’s what you aim for – to get into these kind of festivals. And sometimes you think that they’d be more inclined to award things to people who’ll actually be there which made the win even better really.” Ross also sees this as proof of the projects popularity amongst international audiences, as he explains: “We didn’t know if it would work in America - but they obviously do get it. It seems to be a very audience-friendly film. I’m not sure if juries are mad about it but the audiences have responded really well to it.”
Where his other role is concerned, that of Commissioning Editor of the quarter-annually magazine, Film Ireland, Ross tells us the workload is not what one might expect: “To be honest, I’m Commissioning Editor so really the hard work is done by the people in the office, like Niamh (Film Ireland editor) and the whole team.
“The big thing about me taking the job is that the magazine will now have consistency – we can plan issues months in advance and think about what we want to look at. I had guest edited a documentary-themed issue a while ago and so everything had to have a factual theme, but now we can start looking at all kinds of things happening in the industry, stuff that’s evolving. We can react to things that are happening more. It’s going to be a lot easier for the people working there, a little less harem scarem.”
Ross first became involved with Film Ireland as a guest editor and regular contributor. With several other previous guest editors working on the mag, why does Ross think it was he who was offered the position? “Basically, when I did the issue as the guest editor I think it came across to the people I was working with that I was really enjoying it,” he muses. ”As I’m sure all the guest editors were! Maybe also because I am a freelancer so my lifestyle really suits working park time because I’m still going to be making films. And who knows how long it’ll go on for? Hopefully it’ll work out really well.”
And has Ross made any drastic changes to the magazine in his new position of authority? Some, he tells us: “One of the things you’ll notice about the new issue is that we’ve changed around the regular stuff a little bit.” He says, before further explaining that: “We’re trying to get people who buy the magazine to see the regular pages as being equally as important as the features. I feel like the guest editor coming in would always have concentrated on the features so the regular bits in the magazine tended to be forgotten about a little bit. So we looked at ways to make the regular features a little more interesting and introduced new ones – say, for instance, in this issue on our equipment page we looked at the canon digital SLR cameras and we have a short interview with Kate McCullough about them.”
When asked about the challenging task of juggling two such different career paths, Ross laughs off the suggestion: “When you’re a free-lancer you’re not going to be busy all the tme anyway,” he says. “Unless you’re very lucky!”
Ross is currently working on ideas for his second feature length documentary in which he plans to spend a month coming up with an idea that will sustain the length of a feature but also resonate with people. He envisions this will shoot early next year. Whitaker is also currently putting the finishing touches on an hour long doc called ‘Blind Man Walking’ that looks at the story of the first blind man to race to the North Pole, Mark Pollack, which will screen on RTÉ in September. It would seem quite apparent he is one of the aforementioned “lucky” freelancers.
