After being selected for Accelerator Lab at MIFF 2025 – where his film INFINIT3, starring Sophie Wilde, also screened – Riley Blakeway speaks to MIFF about his experience of the festival, the importance of shooting on film and the important role Dropbox plays in his artistic process.

You’ve had the two short films now at MIFF – one last year [A Thousand Odd Days, MIFF 2024], one this year [INFINIT3]. What’s your experience of the festival been so far?

It’s been incredible. Getting in last year was a huge milestone for me. I always wanted to play at the festival. And it’s really cool to come back a second year in a row, because I’m seeing the same people, and it feels like a little bit of a festival family down here. It’s just a very supportive and nurturing environment for filmmakers in the festival – you get treated really well.

How much did doing Accelerator Lab this time around change your experience of the festival?

I didn’t know what to expect, to be honest, but all I heard was it’s really intense. And then we got the schedules and it was, like, back-to-back. It’s like going back to school, but every lesson is stuff you want to learn.

Everyone in the cohort had their own individual style and background. As directors, it can be really isolating at times; so to get to be all together … it was just a really amazing blend of people and influences. I’m not usually privy to so many directors’ points of views. And to experience the positive feedback from directors I look up to and [from] people funding films was an incredible confidence boost.

INFINIT3 has quite a high-profile cast for an Australian short. What are the challenges involved in getting recognised talent in a film like this?

There are different pathways to getting stuff made and progressing your career, and I’m fortunate that the biggest access I have to getting stuff made is the relationships I have with actors, and actors respecting and trusting my work. In this circumstance, Sophie and I are quite close: I cast her in one of the first things she ever did, maybe like eight years ago – a music video – and we just maintained that back-and-forth ever since.

She’s a genuine person and a real artist. Her passion is what drove the film – it’s what saw it into fruition. Her response when I asked her to do it is the reason I had the confidence to push and make it happen.

Above: A behind-the-scenes photograph from the filming of INFINIT3 | Header: INFINIT3

As a self-taught filmmaker, how have you squared the artistic drive to direct films – to craft beautiful images – with the more mundane logistics of file storage?

I’m quite an organised person. If my desktop is cluttered, I can’t concentrate, or if my apartment’s messy, I can’t work. [With] my commercial reps division, it’s a mandate that everyone has Dropbox. All our projects get uploaded by the producers [and] filed: every single location scout, wardrobe, fitting … every single part of pre-production all the way through to post- is saved in Dropbox, where we all have access to it. It’s an integral part of my filmmaking process.

I guess for a lot of people these days making films, so much is digital and computer-based; but working with 16mm requires you to switch between the material and the virtual of, say, film and Dropbox. What’s that balance like for you, and how do you make it all work together?

Thankfully, we don’t have to physically cut film together – I’m not sure how feasible that process would be in this day and age! I shoot on film because I can’t emulate that look digitally. Having made images for almost two decades now, it’s super important to me, that tangible film look and the way it deals with motion.

Shooting on film doesn’t change the workflow; I’m using Premiere to make previews of visualisations, filming pretty much every scene on my phone, cutting all that together, [and making] mood boards and light boards for every scene – all of that stuff is a big part of my process, and it’s all filed and stored on Dropbox.

In terms of budget, I’m guessing that shooting on film is a lot more expensive than digital. But can it also help in terms of getting funded, in terms of the prestige of shooting on film?

Thankfully, with this film, Kodak gave us a little bit of support. One of the main hard costs was film; we [also] got lenses shipped up from Melbourne because we wanted specific modern lenses to go on the Arriflex SR3 – those lenses are rare, so it does add complications.

It’s been a big part of the aesthetic I’ve created with my work. But it depends who you ask: if you ask my dad, he’s not going to notice the difference between film and digital; if you ask my peers and my colleagues, and the cinematographers and the film nerds I respect, [they would]. So, for me, I don’t think it’s something where I’m setting out to be prestigious by using a certain medium – it’s more just what feels right to me. It feels like cinema.

And yet it’s still kind of a niche thing these days, right?

Here, yeah. But overseas, it’s so normal. It’s funny, because it was the standard; then digital came in, and that technology keeps growing and improving, and it seems almost endless. Every year, a new camera comes out with a higher resolution – like 8K, or whatever the next thing is – and I look at how INFINIT3 looks, and I really don’t want my [upcoming] feature to look any more [high-definition]. Those cameras, those formats, they’re just too sharp, too fully realised. I don’t know … that’s my personal taste. No matter how far technology gets, it’s crazy that we’re still shooting on an Arri SR3 on a 16mm gauge, [but] that’s perfect for me.

This article was published in collaboration with Dropbox.