Gender Matters
Brilliant Stories funding
BIographies

News Junkies

Emma Masters Director / Producer

Emma Masters is a journalist turned filmmaker with more than 20 years’ experience in media and communications in Australia and overseas. Her dedication and commitment to storytelling is evident in the body of work she has produced as a filmmaker and journalist in the Northern Territory, a television producer and presenter in South-east Asia and a multimedia producer and writer in Adelaide. Based in the Northern Territory, Emma runs boutique production company Weave Films, where she makes her own films and collaborates with other filmmakers on their projects. In 2015 she was the recipient of both the Australian International Documentary Conference’s Emerging Producer Access Award (working at Endemol on web series Fragments of Friday and Hot Plate) and of the Screen Australia/Screen Territory Realisator Initiative. Her recent projects include various producing/directing roles on the Discovery US Animal Planet documentary special Land of the Super Crocs, Territory Cops (Channel 10), Fishing the Wild (Seven Mate) and feature film Last Cab to Darwin. Emma also has a specialist background in interactive multimedia and has produced numerous websites, kiosks, animations/video shorts. She has first-class honours in Communications and Media, and Master of Journalism (coursework).

Kristy O’Brien Producer

Kristy O’Brien has, for decades, been involved in the production of factual television, as a journalist, presenter and producer travelling across Australia, Africa and South-east Asia. She’s spent the last eight years with the ABC in Darwin filing for specialist content, Current Affairs and News. In 2012 she made the foray into independent documentary production, producing an independent digital project Cattle Scars about the live export suspension fallout. Awarded the Access@AIDC internship as Australia’s emerging young producer, she went to London to work with Jamie Oliver’s Fresh One Productions in 2014. She worked as an Assistant Producer on a number of projects including Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube and BBC Channel 4’s Don’t Stop the Music (2014). Upon moving back to Australia she was named in the Screen Producer Australia’s Ones to Watch program in 2014. As part of this award she was financed to complete an internship placement with WildBear Entertainment and has directed Making Tracks for NDR (Germany), Sky, History Channel and Reader’s Digest. In 2015 her first documentary as Executive Producer, Tough Ride, was broadcast on ABC television and ABC iview.

Lucy McNally Writer

Lucy McNally has more than a decade of experience as a journalist with ABC News, covering crime, courts and NSW politics. She has lived in Tamworth, Newcastle and Darwin during her career. Before the ABC, Lucy worked at a local newspaper in her hometown of Penrith. She was the recipient of the University of Western Sydney’s Vice-Chancellor’s Leadership Scholarship. Last year, Lucy was asked by ABC management to mentor disadvantaged students in Western Sydney as part of an in-house program. Lucy is looking to make a transition into screenwriting, for film and television. To that end, she has undertaken the following training: February 2016, two-day observership on a new drama being developed by Essential Media, organised by Ian Collie; January 2016, handed in a script for Home & Away submission program; March/April 2015, travelled to New York to study an eight-week course in Television Writing, teacher Alan Kingsberg (during which she completed a spec for Girls); 2014, completed a 10-week online course with AFTRS under Anne Brooksbank; 2014, attended a two-day workshop, Cracking Yarns, under Allen Palmer.

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