Director and producer Aaron Falvey, actors and film makers Jaemes Churchward and Geoff Anderson, studio owner and film patron Rick Osborne, and art director Roger Wadham on set at Sawmill Studios. Photo: Sarah Brown
Sawmill to silver screen Words: Judene Edgar
A group of passionate creatives and filmmakers are creating magic for our screens in an old sawmill, turned studio. Sawmill Studios, Blenheim’s first film studio is finding national and international success with their locally made films.
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n 2004 Roger Wadham put New Zealand on the map, literally, when he ran an email campaign determined to see New Zealand on the giant Universal Studios globe at the entrance to its Los Angeles theme park, and now he’s helping to put Marlborough on the map. Starting life as a boat builder in West Auckland in the 1970s, Roger never planned to get into filmmaking, but after 30 years in the industry, he’s still as passionate as ever, perhaps even more so. He was working in Australia when he got a call from someone asking if he could make “soft rocks” for a movie. “To this day I still don’t know who it was or why they’d even rung a boat builder; it’s not really the first person you’d think of to make film props,” he says. But his creativity and ingenuity came to the fore and before you know it those soft rocks were being used on Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. “My skill level was around spontaneous creativity to random requests to make strange things,” Roger laughs. “It’s a very dynamic
environment so being able to respond quickly and ably to whatever’s asked of you certainly helped.” His next step was Los Angeles and a very busy and varied career working on movies, television shows and commercials making props, building sets and then moving into project management. “It was six to seven days a week. I was usually the first person in in the morning, and the last person out at the end of the day.” In 2010 he moved back to New Zealand for family reasons, assuming that his filmmaking days were behind him. Shifting to Blenheim six years ago to work on the second exhibition area at Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre, he soon found himself thrust back into filmmaking. Passionate local film director Aaron Falvey had set up the Top of the South Film Production Society to support filmmaking in the region. Roger went along
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