Vancouver filmmakers win $10,000 scholarships, Comic Con award

Congrats go out to two local filmmakers have been named the inaugural winners of $10,000 Daryl Duke scholarships that will go towards furthering their education.

The scholarship is named after Daryl Duke, an Emmy Award–winning director and producer who worked at the NFB and CBC, is best known for directing the TV miniseries The Thorn Birds, and also founded the independent Vancouver TV station CKVU in 1976. He died in 2006 at the age of 77.

The first of the two recipients is writer, director, and producer Michael Parker, who is planning to use the scholarship to obtain a Masters of Fine Arts in Film Production and Creative Writing degree at UBC.

The other recipient is director of photography and producer Amy Belling will apply the award toward completing her Masters of Fine Arts in Cinematography at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

Belling helped found the UBC Film Alumni Association, which helped to save the UBC Film Production program from being cancelled.

Belling's on an award-winning roll at the moment, it seems. She was also the producer of "Hirsute", a short film about time travel written and directed by fellow Vancouver filmmaker A.J. Bond. The film scooped up the best science fiction/fantasy film award at the 2009 Comic Con International Independent Film Festival in San Diego this past weekend.

If you want to see how A.J. Bond achieved the smooth-skinned appearance he features in his short film (a much more mind-boggling technique than the time-traveling process), watch this short clip of his body waxing experience (which doesn't appear quite as traumatic as the one in The 40-Year-Old Virgin):