GUEST SPEAKERS: Kodie Bedford, Simone MacKinder and Claire Renton
Kodie Bedford was born in Western Australia, with strong family ties to East Kimberley. Kodie wrote episodes of ABC drama series Mystery Road. Her episode was nominated for a 2020 AACTA award for Best Screenplay in Television. Her play Cursed!, the recipient of the 2019 Balnaves Fellowship, was performed at Belvoir in 2020. Cursed! won the 2021 Stage AWGIE, and Kodie also won the 2021 AWGIE Major Award. Kodie wrote and executive produced 2021 ABC iView series All My Friends Are Racist, which won the 2021 AACTA for Best Short Form Comedy. She is currently in production on Firebite, a vampire series produced by See-Saw for AMC.
Simone Mackinder has 25+ years in the TV industry … her work reaching a broad range of audiences locally and abroad. Armed with degrees in Biology, plus Film & Television and Journalism, she is an accomplished Series Producer, Writer and Researcher with hundreds of hours of broadcasted material to her name across a spectrum of genres including Documentary, Children’s, Travel, Lifestyle and Reality. Recent credits include Caught in Motion, two seasons of Just Animals, four seasons of Baby Animals (Wildbear Entertainment) and three years as Series Producer of Totally Wild (TEN). Simone is a member of the Australian Writers’ Guild.
Claire Renton is the Animation Director and occasional Screenwriter for the Emmy-awardwinning Bluey television series. Born and bred in Brisbane, Claire started working in her first animation studio at sixteen and has been hooked ever since. Since then her obsession for animation and storytelling has led her across Asia and the UK, creating animation for television and feature films and working with Disney, CollegeHumor, Halfbrick, GOMA and more recently, Ludo Studio. Claire has begun her foray into professional screenwriting on Bluey and is excited to talk about her failures and discoveries as she’s been learning the craft.
