I have been in Melbourne longer than intended. What was initially only meant to be a visit for a month or so, has stretched into a stay over four months as I’ve helped my mum move into a retirement village and sell the family home. Cleaning out the house has taken me for a trip down memory lane as I’ve discovered props, pictures, and DVDs from my first ever film: Shades of the Soul.

Hardly a soul has seen the film. Pun intended. I made it back in 2006 together with my friend Heath Novkovic, co-writing and co-directing. It is actually a feature film, 87 minutes long. I also played the antagonist, Leviticus, a military commander leading an expedition in the jungle when he is attacked and corrupted by a demon. He puts on a mask (we knew so little about copyright the mask in question is a replica from the band Slipknot) and begins gruesomely killing his own unit one by one, until the final confrontation with the lead protagonists and lovers Alexandra ‘Ice’ Peterson and Marcus ‘Dracon’ Maitlin. It was typical slasher fare with a touch of occult, only more poorly done than most, due to our total lack of experience and budget.

It’s such an amateurish film that it was never released, and I don’t even count it in my filmography. We were a bunch of dreamers running around the ‘jungles’ of Brimbank Park with camcorders, playing at filmmakers. But as I sat down and watched the film for the first time in many, many years, inspired by the nostalgia this trip to Melbourne instigated, I realized something: there is freedom in naivety.