Aligned and Thriving Podcast | Strategies for Work Life Balance

Balancing Creativity and Social Impact: Insights from Filmmaker Heather Ogilvie

• Judith Bowtell | Career Development for Achieving Work-Life Balance • Episode 21

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In this episode of the Aligned and Thriving podcast, host Judith Bowtell welcomes Heather Ogilvie, a renowned producer and writer of female-focused films and television shows. Heather is the founder of Galvanized Film Group, and her projects often draw inspiration from literary works, exploring themes that resonate with mature female audiences.

The conversation delves into Heather's journey, from her early days of social activism to her foray into the entertainment industry. They discuss the complexities of filmmaking, the art of storytelling, the importance of work-life balance, and Heather's passion for mentoring aspiring filmmakers.

Podcast Episode Summary

  • Heather shares her perspective on maintaining work-life balance, highlighting the joy of spending time with her grandson, Miles, as a cherished moment.
  • They explore Heather's path to filmmaking, her initial interest in social work, and her desire to create meaningful stories that challenge the status quo.
  • Heather discusses her criteria for selecting projects, emphasizing the need to visually connect with the story and characters.
  • The challenges of financing films are addressed, with Heather sharing her insights into attracting private investors and navigating government funding.
  • Heather reflects on the portrayal of mature women in film and the importance of emotional honesty and authenticity in storytelling.
  • They discuss Heather's involvement in initiatives addressing domestic violence and supporting traumatized children, highlighting her dedication to social justice.
  • Heather shares her excitement about her upcoming directing debut and her commitment to continuous learning in the creative process.

What We Learn from the Guest

Through Heather's experiences, we gain valuable insights into the world of filmmaking, the art of storytelling, and the dedication required to bring meaningful stories to life. Her journey highlights the importance of perseverance, passion, and a commitment to creating authentic narratives that resonate with audiences. Additionally, Heather's involvement in social causes serves as an inspiration for using one's platform to drive positive change.

Connect with Heather Ogilvie

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[00:00:00] Judith Bowtell: Good morning, everybody. It's Judith Bowtell and welcome back to another episode of Aligned and Thriving. Today I am so excited because I have somebody that I have known professionally for many years and somebody who I've always held in quite high esteem in some of that professional world. And that is Heather Ogilvie. Good morning, Heather.

[00:00:29] Heather: Good morning, Judith. Nice to be talking to you.

[00:00:32] Judith Bowtell: It's excellent to be talking to you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today to talk about what has you thriving in work and life and what you're passionate about. But first of all, I thought I might just give a little bit of an intro for our audience out there about who Heather is and what she's up to. 

[00:00:51] Judith Bowtell: Heather Ogilvie describes herself as a producer and writer of strong, female focused film and television. She has her own production company, Galvanized Film Group, and I encourage you to check her out on IMDb to see some of the projects she's been associated with. Heather has strong creative skills and will always take a hands on collaborative role in the script and story development on the projects she produces. She chooses projects that are almost always based on option literary property, and she's drawn to material that speaks to a mature female audience about themselves whether in a historical or contemporary context. So now you can hear why her work is so powerful. She's acted as an executive producer for other producers, and so in that she's going to construct complex financing deals across a range of projects while working with both government and private investors. And I think this is really important to remember that the challenge of the entertainment industry is to devise financing plans that recognise the need to attract the private sector while maintaining a reasonable recruitment position for soft money, all the while juggling the demands of the marketplace and keeping your audience firmly in your sights. Making film and television is not easy. If I could say that a thousand times over, it is so complex. I had one colleague say it's the type of complexity that can make people's brains bleed. So it's very special people who can balance both the story development and the financing. And Heather is one of those people and she's been doing this for many years as well. But Heather has not only worked on her own projects, she's a passionate mentor of new participants in the film and television sector. She's been a lecturer and a professional trainer for the Australian Film, Television and Radio School for the Sydney Film School and for the Tisch School of Arts at New York University. So welcome again, Heather. It's lovely to have you here.

[00:02:56] Heather: You Judith, it's nice to be here.

[00:02:59] Judith Bowtell: So let's kick this off with the question I always asked and I'm always interested to know, what have you done lately for your work life balance?

[00:03:07] Heather: That's an easy question for me to answer. Seven months ago, seven and a half months ago, my youngest daughter who's in her thirties after many failed attempts, had a beautiful baby boy and he's just such a treasure. And she lives in a very close by. So my life work balance all exists around Miles and spending time with him, spending time with Aaron. Last week she text me and said, do you have to work on Wednesday? I need to do this. Would you like to come? And we went off shopping and I just kept thinking, I don't even care what's happening on my email world. They'll always be there. I get to spend time with a baby who smiles all the time. So yeah, that's it. That's my life work balance.

[00:03:57] Judith Bowtell: Oh, Miles with the smiles. Oh, so beautiful. And he's seven months old now.

[00:04:04] Heather: Yeah. So really getting to that point where he's engaging and such a happy child. And it's just, he's so wanted and loved. It's very special.

[00:04:14] Judith Bowtell: Oh, awesome. That's a wonderful way to keep your life in balance. And yeah, it's not that the emails be the most important thing. Oh, that's so exciting. I'm sending my love to baby Miles and looking forward to seeing his progress in the world. Thank you for sharing that with us. Yeah. And a lot of people say that I'm not a grandmother cause I'm not a mother, so never will be, but I am a great aunt and a grunty dude. And I do think there's something about that when the next generation comes into your life and that ability to be involved in a baby's life or a child's life, but not have to be totally responsible for of them

[00:04:53] 

[00:04:53] Heather: 100 percent.

[00:04:55] Judith Bowtell: Yeah, it's a really beautiful relationship to have. I've been fortunate to have that with my nieces and I hope that'll continue with my one and only at this moment, Great Bees. And yeah, it is really lovely to have these newborns and babies in your life but you don't have to do the waking up in the middle of the night.

[00:05:15] Heather: I have a six and an eight year old grandson with my older daughter, my eldest daughter.

[00:05:20] Judith Bowtell: Wow. 

[00:05:21] Heather: Yesterday we brought the baby and the six and eight year old together. And it was just like first time I've seen all of them. And I just looked at this group, my daughters, their babies, their children. And it was like, Oh, this is my heart is full. Yeah. Yeah. It was a yay moment. Yeah, definitely.

[00:05:43] Judith Bowtell: I could talk about that all day, but we need to get into the work part of your life as well. But let's ease into that slowly by asking you, what did you learn yourself about work and life? About work in particular, when you were growing up?

[00:06:00] Heather: Yeah, that's an interesting question because from a fairly young age, I felt a sense that my values didn't align with my parents, they were very conservative, very religious people, so it wasn't like they were, wicked people in any way, but I just felt from the very early days, for example. I could see that my mother was frustrated being a stay at home mum, and she was happiest when she was volunteering, because at least she was being herself. And then as I got older into my teens I started to become politically aware. I went on my first Vietnam march. I snuck out of school and went on a march, an anti Vietnam march when I was about 14. Yeah, so the division of between what I was brought to believe growing up and what I became to believe as an adult started quite young. Having said that, my father was a very wonderful primary school teacher and was hugely loved by his students and their parents. So I was always terribly proud of that in him. 

[00:07:12] Judith Bowtell: Yeah, I think it's interesting that sometimes, yes, we might be on different paths than our parents in terms of religion or politics, but also politics has changed so much since. My mother was fairly conservative in her beliefs but by the time she passed away, she was quite radicalised into the labor movement. And because what she grew up with was no longer what she recognised even about Catholicism. She was a staunch Catholic woman, but even the cracks were starting to show in her relationship with the church by the end as well. Yeah. 

[00:07:50] Heather: My dad after my mother had died, when my dad hosted a special dinner for his gay niece and her wife. And I just felt like the tables had revolved around and my dad was sitting closer to where I was in the world. So that was lovely. 

[00:08:08] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. And to see his ability to accept something that had changed. And often it is through that personal connection of a niece or a cousin or somebody like that. Yeah, I won't go into my family stories around that but that's a whole other conversation we could have. Yeah, but let's move into, so as you said, you've been working in film and television production for some time. How did you get into this line of work? What was the steps towards that? 

[00:08:37] Heather: Well, I did a social work degree. I like to say that I did social work degree because my mother wanted me to help people but in fact I think she wanted to help people and do have very strong social justice worldview, that is part of what defines me as a person. And enjoyed the degree it was at what is now Curtin University in Perth, which is where I grew up. But I felt as if really ultimately my job would be to put band aids on people's problems and that was really unsatisfying. To be honest, I actually was probably one of those people that wanted to change the world. So I figured putting a band aid on the problem wasn't going to change the world. I was involved with a group of women in the school the social work school who set up what I believe may well be Australia's first women's refuge. And that has become a lifelong passion for me, supporting women and working towards helping women escape violence, which of course is subject on everybody's lips at the moment and hopefully stays that way. So that's been a lifelong passion of mine. But then I went overseas as you do, as you did, and I ended up landing a job, surprisingly, in the natural history unit at the BBC. And although I am not a natural history person, I'm, I've made one documentary apart from what we did in there. I really enjoyed the storytelling. David Attenborough's working in his team and he's a wonderful storyteller in a natural history environment. So I came back and I back to Australia after a couple of years and I talked my way into jobs in news and current affairs because I thought that's what I wanted to do given that by this stage I was really quite a politically passionate. But it wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell stories that went so much further than a 30 second news grab. And I was working in the Channel 10 newsroom when Rupert Murdoch owned the channel, and he was quite often in the newsroom, surprisingly often, I think, looking back, this is in the 80s and he would literally sometimes rewrite copy to suit his world view. I, it was very, yeah, it was really

[00:11:02] Judith Bowtell: wow.

[00:11:02] Heather: disturbing for me. I had a great time. I worked for two years in Channel 10 on Good Morning Australia, and I learned so much but eventually I decided to leave and got a job working as a distribution manager for the Sydney Filmmakers Co op, which was really an important organization. And I learned lots and lots about Filmmaking, because we were distributing Australian films where no one else would. We had the first films of Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong and Bruce Beresford and Fred Skepsie and just, lots of really amazing filmmakers, plus some overseas content. So I stayed there for a couple of years and then decided it was time for me to do my own thing. It's a long journey. Nearly 40 years and working on rock clips in the days when they are actually, you could make money off doing rock clips and then moving into children's drama and then that lone documentary about Wayne Gardner and then into the features and television series.

[00:12:10] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. So along this path, you're working within teams in the newsroom, within the distribution company. When you made that choice, what was the big difference of going, obviously a big difference, but what was the big, do you really notice the difference of starting your own projects? What was the like day to day work like when you started to do your own projects?

[00:12:33] Heather: That's an interesting question. I can't quite remember there being a dramatic shift in the way that I worked because I, looking back, I think I'd always been somebody who had lots of ideas and lots of driven passion to tell stories in ways that I thought was meaningful. So I feel as If I throw myself back to that time, I feel as if I stepped pretty naturally into filmmaking and it was never going to be anything but producing for me in those days, albeit that I was from very early on. I did as much learning as I could about script. Script development and understanding what makes a good script. And I took as many courses as I could in that, not because at that stage, I thought I wanted to write, but because I wanted to be really productive in that script. Cause I knew that the script was just the the absolute basis for a really strong project.

[00:13:42] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. Yeah. How did you select your projects? What criteria did you use when you were starting out?

[00:13:49] Heather: Mostly stories that actually spoke to me in some way, at what point I was in my life. So I did a children's television series based on a series of books. My two daughters. We're just madly in love with and I would breed with them and it was like, wow, this, I can see it. That has always been my core criteria, which is I have to be able to see it unfolding in front of me and to be at the point I am now. I don't want to jump ahead of what questions you might want to ask, but where I'm actually about to direct my first feature film having written and produced for so many years. It's because I can see what I have to do and how to bring the story to the screen. Yeah it's been a cool part of it. Even like when I was reading books, if I couldn't see it, even if I loved the book, but I couldn't really see it, it didn't interest me. And there's books that I've optioned that never got done because of a variety of reasons but they live in a little part of my heart that's projects I'm passionate about that I'm sad will never hit the screen.

[00:15:05]  Judith Bowtell: Yeah, filmmaking, as I said, is complex, so you have a great story and you've and as in your bio, you said that now you are driven to stories of literary stories of about from the perspective, at least of a mature woman that speaks to something about women's lives. And then, of course, financing all of that as well as a producer. How do you think what you learned as a child or what you learned growing up on those sets, learning about great storytelling, how do you think that translates into leading this process of putting the package together, getting the project off the ground? What have you had to learn as a leader to do that? 

[00:15:47] Heather: Oh a lot. I went Into producing knowing, believing that I would be a strong creative producer and testing myself to make sure that I had the tools that I needed to actually deliver on that expectation of myself that I had. And I had to learn how the financing of a project worked because it's my job. That's part of my job. And as you said, there's so many facets of a producer's job, and one of them is to be creative, and one is to be a leader, and one is to be a financier, and one is to be a mother hen on the set and so on and so forth. But I think, I decided that I really wanted to figure out how the private side of financing could work because the government funding was something that I embraced early and successfully and became really quite comfortable with a low. It's never enjoyable. The process of submitting an application. I'm just doing one at the moment, and there's more than 80 documents that I have to attach to this application.

[00:16:55] Judith Bowtell: Good Lord.

[00:16:56] Heather: And they all have to be formatted just right. And they all have, it's not me. Anyway, it's okay. But what I really wanted to know was how do you turn investment in film or television from a private investors point of view into a viable investment opportunity because it's got such a bad reputation. Dreadful. We don't return money to private investors and why would they give you the money? I couldn't understand that. So I did a deep dive in over a year of talking to venture capitalists, hedge funds, private investors, wealthy people of all sorts of walks of life. I just wanted, and I asked them two things. I asked them probably asked them a lot more, but two key things. Firstly, what level of return do you need to see to make the prospect of investing viable and interesting to you. And then what level of investment do you expect in return for that as an outcome, as a recruitment and outcome. And the answers were really like very challenging. The answers to the first question was around 90 percent return. In order for me to be able to demonstrate a 90 percent return on a private investment was unheard of. then the second part of it was about 110 to 120 percent return. I then sat down with lawyers and accountants and worked, looked at laws around copyright and looked at Australian laws around in private, equity funds and went back to some of those hedge fund people and ultimately we nailed it. And I had the most incredible support from a few people in the private sector. And I won't go into how I nailed it because that's part of my intellectual property.

[00:18:51] Judith Bowtell: Absolutely. You to give your secrets away. 

[00:18:54] Heather: No, they're not secrets. I do share them with other filmmakers, it's boring anyway. But it was, really gratifying and it's made a difference. It's definitely made a difference to my capacity. The other thing that I did is I also went overseas and I worked for a couple of years in conjunction with another Australian writer with Sheridan Jobbins. We worked in Los Angeles with the Disney channel for a couple of years. And I've worked for Warner brothers and I worked in Ireland, but with doing a telemovie with CBS, wonderful book by Colm Toyvan and yeah, I worked with Paramount. So I've had a bigger field of experience to draw on than maybe a lot of people. I don't know, maybe not a lot of people, but personally I've really made sure my network was global, not just Australian. 

[00:19:49] Judith Bowtell: Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting things in there. If I could just reflect because I talk with my career development clients about finding your comfort zone or finding the place of work where you're comfortable and you're confident and happy in terms of work. That's not confident and happy in terms of being on holiday at the beach or whatever, but it's confident and happy in terms of work. And I think it's interesting how you found even the very complex job of applying to government funding that started, if I'm getting this right, that's where you started and felt confident there. And then you really pushed at the edges of your comfort zone to extend into understanding private finance. And then mastering the international the commercial production world as well. So what really supported you to do all that learning and development? What was your motivation around that?

[00:20:40] Heather: Just wanted to be really good at it. I wanted to play with the big people, with the people at the high end of the industry. If you'd asked, if we'd done this conversation 10, 15 years ago, maybe not 10, A while back. And you'd said, what is your ultimate aspiration? I would have said, I want to run a studio. 

[00:21:02] Judith Bowtell: yeah, 

[00:21:03] Heather: I was always really ambitious for myself in a way that I could make a difference, going all the way back. I just wanted to make a difference. And I think that my focus on telling authentic stories that appeal to mature age women, which is generally considered to be 40 plus, but, increasingly maybe even 35 plus was because I felt like that incredible audience of people that were just not being given material that spoke to them about themselves and their lives. And I've always carried this phrase around with me, which is that I want my audiences to have an undeniable sense of the familiar so that when they're sitting in the cinema and watch, and I do love the idea of cinema still. I consumed streaming of like most of us, but I do love the idea of the lights going down and the big, huge screen and the amazing Dolby sound. But I wanted women to be able to go to the movies and see themselves portrayed or if not themselves the emotional journey that a character might go on inside of a world that wasn't necessarily theirs. I wanted to be able to achieve that. And I've always said, I don't want to hear people coming out of the cinema saying it looked good as much as I want it to look good. And I've worked with some amazing cinematographers. I want them to come out of the cinema going, Oh my God, we should tell so and so about this film. It's so good.

[00:22:38] Judith Bowtell: Yeah, but my husband and I go, if we come out and go, what do you think of that? Oh, yeah. Design was really good.

[00:22:45] Heather: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:22:47] Judith Bowtell: The story probably not captured us in the way it was meant to that's sort of our rule. Particularly when we go to festival film but I love that phrase around you recognise yourself in the story. And that mature women would see themselves in perhaps they hadn't had a chance to do that before. What do you think women are looking for in their stories now? We've gone through second waves feminism, third wave feminism rising of radicalised misogyny as well. If you were telling the stories today what do you think women want to be seeing? You are telling the stories today. What do you think women want to see?

[00:23:22] Heather: I think that it's really important that your stories contain emotional honesty and sometimes that's really painful. So my next project deals with a lot of emotional rawness across the whole of the 110 minutes of screen time. But it also aims to tell stories that are entertaining. I don't want it to be gruelling, although personally I don't mind a little bit of gruelling filmmaking as a consumer.

[00:23:59] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. 

[00:23:59] Heather: I think the film will be emotionally challenging, but I'm hoping that it's been written in a way that the emotional honesty is about the way that we share our stories, as women, we're sharing gender of the way we support each other and the way that we recognise, the need for that support. But it's about me finding projects where I go, Oh my God, if only my, I would die to have my name as a producer or a writer on this film. And that then becomes part of my toolbox of what do I want to achieve? If that's the feeling I want, then what do I want to achieve in getting there? What is it I need to include and then spending time with, people whose work I admire and getting feedback from them on the project and saying, okay, where's the authenticity here? Am I being authentic? And then you go into like scripture structure versus character development, and you have to be quite mechanical at certain points. But in all of those mechanics it's about looking for the truth and the authentic emotional honesty. What I have to have more than anything.

[00:25:20] Judith Bowtell: So if you were to be telling your story from somebody who's passionate about anti war movements to supporting women in DV up to now, what would you say would be the through authentic theme that you would want people to take away?

[00:25:35] Heather: Oh my gosh, that's a really big question. How long have you got? No. And could you, could I, can I just give you my therapist's numbers? I'm sure might cut. I think if I was to break it down, if I was to write my story as if it was a pitch for one of my films. I would probably describe the story as I don't know, I'm looking, because of my head space is, I want to be nice and pithy with the pitch of who I am, my story, but it's about persistence and refusal to give up and never not believing in, love and keeping going, just always keeping going, that tenacity. I don't know that actually tells you a story, but it tells you who I think I am. I'm tenacious. I'm passionate. I love my job, even when it's unrewarding because I haven't been paid for four years. 

[00:26:35] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:37]  Heather: That was a, that was an unexpectedly tricky question. It's a really interesting one for me to think about.

[00:26:43] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. wasn't planned. I Just think it's really interesting when you see maybe connecting things and I guess this is, if you open your life up for someone to tell you a story, they'll find connections that you maybe don't. But I do think that the causes you support we were talking before we turned the mics on about Heather's passions for mentoring and supporting younger filmmakers, but also that ongoing passion in the field of domestic violence, which is current at the moment, but it won't be in a few months because other things will take over the media landscape and the problems remain. We know that. As feminists or anyone who's been around these kind of issues, homelessness, women's homelessness, women's exposure to gendered violence. These situations don't solve quickly. Getting a film up, as you said, four years to get a film up. So persistence and resilience, but not in a way that's about defensiveness. It's a really about as you say, an expression of love and expression of passion expression of creation. Yeah. And I think that's really fascinating. When I look at people who do the sort of work that you do and have done for many years.

[00:27:55] Heather: And I think, that to reflect on what did going right back to the beginning of this question, this conversation, to reflect on what influence did my upbringing have on the person that I am now, certainly there was my parents faith and commitment to helping others is ingrained in me. We just did it in different ways. But, it's definitely what I was brought up to be a person that who cared about what was going on for other people. And I don't know about you, but I have been finding myself just in tears lately about what's happening around the domestic and family violence. Because I feel like I feel grief. I feel physical pain and grief that I'm still part of trying to make this better. And Yeah it actually hurts that we're still doing this, and maybe we always will, but I just wish that we could make some difference. Anyway, there's an interesting article in the Herald on the weekend with Hannah, somebody rather, who from Cheek Media.

[00:29:14] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. I, yes. Cheek media. Cheek Media.

[00:29:18] Heather: Yeah. It was really interesting. I know about Cheek Media. Reading her interview, it sounded like myself 30 years ago, 40 years ago. 

[00:29:27] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. I read that interview too, and I saw her speaking not live, but saw her speaking at the rallies as well. And feeling that anger especially at Channel 7 for taking out, taking people's trauma and to sell advertising space, basically. And how cynical their appearance there. Maybe not the individuals who turn up, they may be very well minded individuals, but the cynicism of the network I guess is what I'm reflecting on there. It's really hard. I went to a conference many years ago about homelessness and everyone in that room was basically saying, I can't believe we're here 20 years later and things have got not better. It doesn't feel like we've improved anything. It's just plugging the holes in the system. And so there was despair in those rooms. We're sharing ideas and that sounds great and what have you, but there was an overall sort of sense of where's the big solution? Like, where's the big difference going to be made? I just think it's about reframing these situations, not as people have said, it's not a women's problem. It's a men's problem. But I think it's a ideological problem. It's misogyny. We have to name it as an ideology to which some people subscribe and some people become radicalised in and take that to the point of violence. And if we perhaps started looking at patterns of behaviour through radicalisation rather than an individual just, I don't know, had a breakdown one day, we might be able to support men to find their own solutions or communities to find solutions. I don't know, but I think it, we need to stop. The way we think about the problem needs to change. Yeah, that's my personal belief, yeah.

[00:31:09] Heather: I agree with you. And although In a way, one of the problems with this problem, the problem is, it feels like an understatement is that so many parts to the whole story. And to some extent, you need to deal with each part as it's needing its own resources and support. And I put up a motion. You can choose to include this or not. I put up a motion recently at my local branch, the Labour Party, of which I'm a member. And I was doing some research. It was about the acute shortage of safe places, refuges for women on the lower North Shore, which is where I live. And I was doing some research in, by talking to women who are active on the ground in this space. Working, working women. And I discovered that there was, in fact, another part of this piece of the pie of this problem, which was that there are only 20 caseworkers in New South Wales trained to deal with traumatised children. And I think part of the trauma for children, so many refugees have no access to specialised caseworkers. And for all the right reasons, quite a few of them are in the country and rural and regional areas. Hmm. One of the things that we need to look at in terms of why. What can we do to change men onto is that young children and particularly boys come out of that situation and their trauma is not only from having either been victims of violence or witnessing it, but also from losing a father most of them. Yeah, who may be just awful but he's still the father and so for children to come into these places disorientated, distressed and completely traumatised by what they've witnessed and not have someone work with them. What do we expect is going to happen. It feels yes, okay. They're going to take that trauma into their adult lives. And who knows? So that's what I'm now personally working to encourage, we've got a labor government, so it's good time for me to be putting my effort, personal life efforts into, and it is a way, part of my life work balance.

[00:33:39] Judith Bowtell: Yeah. Absolutely. This is something I'd like to explore more about how people who are really involved with the community or involved in politics or involved with a religious practice, how that can also be ways that we do balance our life, our work and life. Thank you for sharing that. I do know that Chris Minns who is the Premier of New South Wales, announced a package this weekend.

[00:34:05] Heather: Yes, it did 

[00:34:06] Judith Bowtell: Did that include more money for kids support?

[00:34:09] Heather: Yes it did.

[00:34:11] Judith Bowtell: It work!

[00:34:12] Heather: Yes, I don't take personal credit, but I feel like the motion went through the branch and then up to head office, state head office, and then it went to Jody Harrison, Kate Washington, and Chris Minns. And there's some money there now, so we just need to make sure there's people who can do the job and that's the other side of the problem.

[00:34:36] Judith Bowtell: Yes. Oh yes. But that's a great win. As you say, was I personally responsible? No, but that's communal anyone who's worked in social change or social justice, it's a communal effort of many voices saying the same thing. So don't stop using your voice because it's when there's agreement things can change. Anyway, before I get into my policy training workshop, which I don't need to do right here, I'm going to say thank you so much to Heather for sharing such wisdom with us today from her working life and experiences and her passions. And what creates meaning for her. Just one thing, what's next for you?

[00:35:16] Heather: Fingers crossed as always, nothing changes really. We'll start shooting in late January on what may well be my final major project. I don't intend to leave the industry completely and I've got, I'm working on another low budget feature, which again is female focused and quite based on an article I cut out of a newspaper, literally cut out of a newspaper when there was no online, about 20 years ago and then found it when I moved a year ago. So yeah, that's directing, directing is next. Oh my God.

[00:36:02] Judith Bowtell: Oh, wow. That's so exciting.

[00:36:05] Heather: So I've been doing a deep dive into the world of actors and acting and I went to a course at NIDA and I've had mentors myself. I've become a mentee learning as much as I can. 

[00:36:17] EJudith Bowtell: Wow. Yeah, that continuous learning of anyone in a creative practice it's part of your DNA as well. So thank you.

[00:36:24] Heather: You're welcome 

[00:36:25] Judith Bowtell: You want if you want to know more about Heather and her practice, you can have a look at the Galvanized Films website. You can check her out on IMDB and of course on LinkedIn. And yeah, have a look through the streaming services for Heather's projects. And also of course, keep an eye out for the new ones that are coming up too. We'll have details of those in the show notes. All right. So thank you, Heather. And thanks

[00:36:51] Heather: You're welcome.

[00:36:52] Judith Bowtell: for sticking with us today as we delved into the worlds of passion and creativity and where that can take you when that's your driving, a driving motivation in work and life. Okay. We'll take care of that and take care of everyone and we'll see you all soon. Bye.

[00:37:12] Heather: Bye bye. 

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Judith Bowtell

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