It's glacially slow going, says a local film editor and animator who is keen to find patrons to support his online military political series taking place in a fictional version of 1980s history.

'It's set in 1989 but it's an alternative version where things have gone differently from the late-1970s onward,” says Tauranga's Lewis Roscoe, a full-time editor and animator developing his ‘The War At Home' series in his spare time.

'Instead the Cold War erupts into an actual war. There's so many stories and movies of the era, I thought it would be very interesting to see the South Pacific arena and how things would play out with New Zealand and Australia at that time.

'David Lange is still the Prime Minister in June 1989 so it's quite an interesting dilemma he's in with NZ as ‘nuclear free', so do we let American ships in because it's WW3 now?”

A one-man-band – apart from some notable Kiwi actors who've given time and skills for voiceovers, such as Shortland Street's Karl Burnett – producer/director Lewis started developing the story idea about 2014. In 2018 he began turning it into animated episodes.

Taught myself

Lewis and his wife Rachael shifted from Hamilton to Welcome Bay in 2019, after living in Auckland. From high school he's been immersed in filmmaking.

'I started doing Indie filmmaking with other people and realised how complicated it is as you have to rely on people and locations. I taught myself to animate because I thought that's a way you can do it all yourself, whatever you can imagine, you can create if you're good enough.”

The detail

He went to animation school, before starting freelance animating as a job and his ‘The War At Home' series as a side hobby. The amount of detail in each episode takes many hours. 'I grew up watching a lot of war movies. As a child I was quite fixated on World War II, but after most likely an oversaturation of the genre through war movies and comics I looked toward other modern conflicts. Vietnam and Korea were very interesting to learn about but the wider ideological conflict of the Cold War began to captivate me.”

The twist is that instead of the usual American or European frontier being the setting, he decided to make NZ the place for a modern conflict. 'In future episodes government ministers of the time will have very lengthy debates about what to do. All the people that would be in their spots at that time are for the most part where they are, so you have these historical figures but they're up against events that didn't actually happen.”

So far he has 13 patrons on the Patreon website. 'Eventually I'd like to transform this into something that I can do full-time. I want to pay back everyone who has lent their voice and helped out. It's a bit of a long game, I just keep at it.” Lewis' series can be watched on: https://war89.tv