Communications student finds ghost in music box

MEDIA RELEASE

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2018

Communications student finds ghost in music box

Imagine a drag queen ghost in corsets who lives inside a music box.
That’s just one of the characters in Communications student Rose Goldthorp’s 90-minute feature film, A Ghost in Corsets, which premieres at Devonport’s cinema - The Vic. on 2 September.

Rose, 20, who is in her second year of a Bachelor of Communications at the University of Auckland, has been making plays, and then films since she watched the original 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs film on DVD and knew then what she wanted to do with her life.

She began with a hand-held cassette camera her father gave her eight years ago when her family was living in France. Hours spent alone reading through a library of 2,500 books with no TV fuelled her imagination and screen ideas.

“I love storytelling and have a major obsession with the creative side of filmmaking,” says Rose. “I keep a book by my bed and write ideas as they come. The latest is a surreal comedy – a group of people fight their way through an insane government.”

From the hand-held camera, Rose progressed to her own HD camera (and a variety of DSL cameras belonging to her various directors of photography). With help from family and anyone she can muster, Rose has made over 15 short films, two featurettes of 45 minutes each, a sci-fi called Watcher and an Edwardian rom-com: Silverville - both set in New Zealand; she also has numerous feature scripts, finished, and in draft.

“I enjoy organising and scriptwriting and I am a bit high-energy,” Rose says of her raison d’etre. “And I love the community part of filmmaking”.

She says she would like to make a living as a writer and director, “and continue to make my own films, but I’m realistic and I wanted to have a back-up plan and that’s why I am doing a Communications degree – and I’m learning a lot”. Her papers include in social media, politics, journalism and television journalism which have all given her a good view of the media and how it interacts with the outside world and vice versa.

“It’s also fascinating looking at all the different media there are today and how they mix together. That’s something that’s very relevant to filmmaking.”

And she won’t be giving up filmmaking anytime soon. “I’m a bit stubborn, the more people say no, the more I want to keep going.”

A Ghost in Corsets is billed as an odd-ball comedy with a dark twist. For more information see: A ghost in corsets

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