From Mako Island to the Film Set: Where it all began

I was never just watching films, I was studying how they were made.

As a child, I was fascinated by H2O: Just Add Water. While my sister enjoyed the film, I watched behind the scenes videos on YouTube to understand how they filmed the underwater scenes and created the world of Mako Island. I was curious about the process, how things worked and how the magic was built.

At five years old, I started playing theatre. Being on stage taught me more than performance. It taught me teamwork and responsibility. I learned to improvise when something went wrong during a show or when someone forgot their lines. The performance had to continue, no matter what.

That mindset has stayed with me ever since.

Around the same time, my friends and I began creating our own “movies.” When one of my older friends got a camera, we started producing dramatic stories. Since we were not able to edit, we filmed everything in sequences. If we made a mistake, we started again from the beginning and forced our parents later on to sit on the couch and watch our “premieres”.

Looking back, it was chaotic, improvised, and technically questionable, but it was pure creativity. Even then, I wasn’t just acting in front of the camera. I was thinking about the scenes, organizing who would play which role, figuring out how to make things work with what we had.

What started with mermaids and homemade premieres slowly turned into something more serious. The curiosity about “how” never left me and it simply grew. Today, that same curiosity drives me on professional sets. The difference is that the productions are bigger, the teams larger, and the stakes higher, but my fascination remains the same.