Through Film Victoria’s Women in Games program, the five women will increase their business knowledge and technical skills through self-brokered professional development opportunities.
Independent Game Developers Grace Bruxner and Barbara Kerr will travel internationally and within Australia to visit and undertake a studio placement respectively. Aspen Forster, an artist with Firemonkeys, Finance Manager Fiona Murray and Lead Artist at Monsterscope Studios Shanti Dumitru will combine their first-hand knowledge with traditional education through various advanced study and mentoring opportunities.
Meet our recipients below.
With a flair for narrative writing, logic editing and quest design, Barbara has played a key role in her field since 2013. Her credits include Warlock of Firetop Mountain (2016), Miss Fisher and the Deathly Maze (2017) and many more.
More recently Barbara has flexed her skills in moderation and leadership, facilitating panels at PAX and GX Australia and organising ‘Get That Game Done’ – a monthly production support meetup for indie game developers.
Producing high quality, optimised 3D art assets for mobile games, console and VR environments, Aspen excels in creating models, animating characters and re-imagine environments.
Aspen is currently improving her skill set in developing tools for art pipelines and speeding up work flows and is particularly interested in becoming a Technical Artist. Most recently she has been working as an environment artist on Real Racing 3 at Firemonkeys EA and is a keen participant of Global Games Jam and #SheHacksGames.
Shanti has been involved in game development since she was 13 years old. Self-taught in 3D Art, Shanti improved her skills in digital art through various professional softwares such as Adobe Photoshop before going on to formally study a Dual Diploma of Games and Digital Media. Shanti is currently working on Dawnblade as the Lead Artist. Her goal is to one day become a producer and lead a full team of developers on many exciting new game projects.
Fiona Murray is the Finance Manager for Surprise Attack, which encompasses indie games label Fellow Traveller, specialist games PR agency Double Jump Communications and indie games fund The Treasure Hunters' Fanclub. She has been with Surprise Attack since its inception in 2012 and built the majority of the company's unique financial infrastructure and processes from the ground up.
Grace has been working as an independent game developer for over three years, developing small-scale and experimental games. Her work has featured in exhibitions and festivals around the world including Fantastic Arcade 2017 (Austin, USA), MAGFest 2017 (Maryland, USA), Contours 2017 (Melbourne) and St Kilda Film Festival 2018 (Melbourne). In recognition of her contribution to alternative and experimental games development in the region Grace was a keynote speaker at the recent 2018 Play by Play Festival in Wellington, New Zealand.
Grace currently works at League of Geeks in Quality Assurance.
To find out more about our skills and development initiatives, visit our Skills and Business Support page.