My name is Daniel Woods and I am a recent Swinburne University Graduate from the Advanced Diploma of Film and Television.
I was born and raised in Melbourne Victoria, I have been studying Film and Television for three years at Swinburne Hawthorne.
I have worked on many short films as a key role, mainly being; Producer, Writer and Director. I have also done other crew roles on set such as; Personal Assistant, Best Boy, Grip.
Mild will be my directorial debut as my first proper documentary, I have done fictional short films before in the past, but they’ve either been release online or at smaller festivals.
I am currently working on more short films in the coming year that I’m either producing or directing.
My inspiration for this short doco is my school life, because I have mild autism, hints to where the title of the idea came from. Growing up in school was hard for me and for my friends, we got picked on or told we aren’t capable of doing something ourselves, as we had
autism and we had to do things differently and were treated like baby’s, which is wrong and disgusting. I also had similar things through my family as well, saying I won’t be able to do anything
successful in my life, as people don’t want to have someone with a
disability work with them. This is the reason for my inspiration, and why I didn’t do it on myself, is because I don’t want it to be all about me, rather than make it about us story, us individuals with intellects.
I wanted to start a conversation with this piece, I wanted to create something that the audience can watch and really listen to on how life for people and I with autism or any or intellect get treated in life, I wanted them to be told straight how it is, I wanted them to really feel something.
Why I decided now I wanted to tell a story like this, is because it’s time for the
audience to know that with or without autism, don’t judge someone differently
because they were given a gift without their control, because they were born with different perspectives on how other’s see something for what it is, for how they see something for what it could be.
Documentary Film Festival. Los Angeles & Toronto 