This was my major film project when I attended the now defunct Footscray City Film School, which was housed at Footscray City College. This film, while not being my personal favourite piece of work, was probably my most successful film. It's very rough, it's a student film. Unless you've actually studied filmmaking you might not understand why I had to make some of the decisions I made while making this. The first thing you need to understand is that Film is a collaborative art form. Often the Producer, Director, and Stars enjoy most of the credit, but every crew member makes an important contribution to the finished product. At the Footscray film school we were lucky enough to be provided with professional film equipment, and our crew was made up of our fellow students. I was working with a budget of about $3000 and much of that was spent on props and salaries for two of the stars who were professional actors. Natalie Eleftheriadis and Shivantha Wijesinha have gone on to have quite successful careers despite not having achieved wide fame. They were and are very talented performers. I decided to take the role of Jacob reluctantly, I would have preferred to have stayed behind the camera, however the actor I initially cast in the role was a bit difficult to work with and due to my deadline, I didn't feel I had time to recast the character. One of my classmates was a Turkish lady and a Muslim and she helped me make the Muslim characters as authentic as possible (thanks Nalan). Casting the character of Osama was very difficult. I approached several actors about the role who were mostly Middle Eastern (I actually approached a Jewish actor too) but none were willing to take the role, mostly due to concern about potential backlash. I have no regrets about casting Shivantha, he's a great actor, but he's Sri Lankan and some critics have accused me of reenforcing the stereotype of the "Indian Taxi Driver". The film does tend to portray the Australian couple a bit more thoroughly than the Muslim couple, but that was more due to scheduling conflicts rather than favouritism and you also need to consider that at the time I made this, my knowledge of Islamic culture was much more limited than it is at this point in my life. Then there is the issue of all the copyrighted material I used. Sourcing the relevant news footage I wanted to use was virtually impossible. YouTube was officially launched on 14 February 2005 and the very first video (“Me at the zoo”) was uploaded by Karim on 23 April 2005. When I was searching the internet for news content, I wasn't even aware it existed and there wouldn't have been any relevant material available there anyway. With my limited resources, and looming deadline I mostly relied on footage I took from Michael Moores Farenheit 9/11. I like to think he'd approve.

I made this as my final major assignment for my Advanced Diploma of Screen at Footscray City College. Solitude was loosely based on my experience running into an old schoolmate in Footscray while I was living there completing my diploma. It was actually quite sad. He had always been very popular when we were in Secondary School, but time had caught up with him, and he was busking near Footscray train station to support a Heroin habit. My facilitators at Footscray City College never understood this film and dismissed it because they thought that film about "Junkies" had been done too often, but I still feel this is my best film thus far. I attempted to purchase rights to the music so I could screen it at festivals, but no one responded to my emails. It uses the song "Solitude" an obscure Black Sabbath track from the Masters of Reality album. Believe it or not, that's Ozzy Osbourne on vocals.