Wednesday
05
Nov
2025
(Auckland) Framing The Film: The Unit Stills-Producer Collaboration

(Auckland) Framing The Film: The Unit Stills-Producer Collaboration

Posted Tuesday 28 Oct 2025

Framing the Film: The Unit Stills Photographer-Producer Collaboration

Brought to you by the New Zealand Film Commission, Sony New Zealand, WIFT & Topic Rentals

Great stills don't just happen. They require planning, collaboration, and understanding their value from day one.

Publicity stills are how you sell your film. They're also a contractual requirement for funders, yet they're often an afterthought in pre-production. This session explores how to approach unit stills strategically: building them into your budget and schedule, meeting funder requirements with high-quality imagery, and creating a collaborative process that delivers compelling promotional assets.

Join us for an insight into the crucial relationship between unit stills photographers and producers, featuring Matt Grace (Pike River, Time Bandits, The Rings of Power) and Vicky Pope (Producer, Pike River, Went Up the Hill, Savage).

Matt and Vicky will share how they approached unit stills on productions (including working together on Pike River and Savage), to capture outstanding stills that served both the creative vision and the practical demands of distribution and publicity.

Whether you're a producer planning your next project or a photographer looking to work in unit stills, this is an opportunity to understand what makes this collaboration work.

Date: Wednesday 5th November
Time: 6pm-7:30pm
Venue: Topic Rentals, 74D France Street South, Eden Terrace, Auckland 1010

Free for WIFT members, $20 for non-members
Drinks & nibbles provided

REGISTER HERE

Date: Wednesday 05 Nov 2025
Location: Topic Rentals
Time: 6pm-7:30pm

Wednesday
05
Nov
2025

Upcoming events...

Wednesday 21 Oct 2026

In Conversation With: Cathy Garcia-Sampana

You may have missed her at the Big Screen Symposium this year, but in our eyes, she was the hidden gem of the conference.

Cathy Garcia-Sampana is one of the most successful filmmakers in the Phillipines. Her films have been the highest-grossing Filipino film of the year on nine occasions, and on six occasions have been the highest-grossing Filipino film of all time (Wikipedia). And with all of that, she spends a half of her time in Aotearoa!

Across a career spanning more than three decades and closely associated with ABS-CBN and its film studio Star Cinema, she has directed some of the most successful and widely watched productions in Philippine screen history. Her credits include One More Chance (2017), The Hows of Us (2018) Hello, Love, Goodbye (2019) and Hello, Love, Again (2024). The themes that are present through her work are family, navigating love, ambition, migration, and personal reinvention.

WIFT & PASC are delighted to have Cathy speak to us about her journey as a filmmaker, working within her values, and how the screen industry in Asia is vastly different from ours.

The session will be moderated by Marc Laureano.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK

Drinks & nibbles provided.

FREE for WIFT & PASC Members | $20 for non-members

Wednesday 21 Oct 2026

Understanding the Archive

What happens to your film after delivery? Ngā Taonga has the answer.

Delivery isn't the end of your film's story. If the New Zealand Film Commission has funded your film, you're required to deposit it with Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Aotearoa's audiovisual archive. Most filmmakers tick that box and move on, but knowing how the archive works can make a real difference to your film's future.

Here's why:
Ngā Taonga preserves and catalogues your material, and when someone wants to screen it or access it, they send that request on to you as the rights holder. Nothing is released without your say. As the years go by, that becomes more and more valuable, whether it's a festival programmer, a researcher or a retrospective curator looking for your work.

So, who are they?
Ngā Taonga holds more than 800,000 audiovisual items dating back to 1894, and cares for the collections of the NZ Film Commission, Te Māngai Pāho, RNZ, TVNZ and much of NZ On Air's funded content, alongside material from Whakaata Māori, the Waitangi Tribunal and many other public and private collections. It's where our screen history lives, and where your work will sit alongside it.

As a filmmaker, it is essential that you know how to make sure your film materials are preserved and archived properly, so your work stays discoverable for generations to come.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK

Free for WIFT Members, $20 for non-members. Drinks & nibbles provided.

Programme is brought to you with generous support from the NZ Film Commission and Foundation North.