“Film is what brought me to Vancouver and then I got distracted by many other things in life that eventually brought me back to film again – so its like a big circle!”

Renee’s “many other things” include traveling in Australia where she discovered scuba diving and a love for the ocean. A self-described mermaid, when Renee returned to Vancouver after traveling in Australia, she managed a dive shop on Granville Island for two years.

Her primary goal coming to InFocus was to create documentary films that inform people of the danger and consequences of mistreating the ocean and the environment. But through her studies with InFocus, her methods have evolved.

As Renee puts it, writing her short film PlastyQuaderBottle “really opened my eyes…I could do something with the message of environmentalism, that I’d like to convey in documentaries, [by] writing it into a fictional story…I never even considered that I could do fiction or drama while still conveying the meaningful messages I wanted to.”

Renee’s enthusiasm for film hasn’t diminished since her arrival to study in Vancouver. But now her filmmaking has a purpose and a message that must be shared – and InFocus is giving her the skills to do that. “I feel now, with the tools I’ve learned [at InFocus], I can make documentaries that carry a message that is important to me…while at the same time, I can apply the creative techniques I’ve also learned, using lighting and camera movement, to meld typical documentary methods with something beautiful and cinematic.”

Check out Renee’s bio project below: