KEY POINTS:
A longtime employee at an Auckland post-production company eventually admitted he made an unauthorised DVD copy of the film Sione's Wedding, an Auckland District Court hearing was told today.
But Frederick Junior Higgins told the company he made the copy only to watch with his family and took it back to work the next day to destroy it, his former boss Gary Little said.
Higgins, 39, faces two charges of theft and one of breaching copyright following the distribution of pirated copies of Sione's Wedding before it was released in cinemas last year.
Digital Post executive director Gary Little said Higgins had been an employee for 11 years when the company was asked to host editing and post-production work for Sione's Wedding in 2005.
Mr Little said Higgins was a highly-regarded employee who often identified problems in films which needed correcting that other staff were unable to spot.
He was also one of about five staff with the technical know-how to burn a copy of an early cut of the film in 2005 to DVD.
Mr Little said he was first told there was a pirated version of the film available in late February 2006, about a month before the film's scheduled release.
He said viewing of the pirated version showed it was of an ungraded submaster copy made in September or October 2005.
This disc, played to the court today, was missing credits, colour correcting and had few of the sound effects and music the film would would eventually have, he said.
Mr Little said Higgins did not attend a staff meeting called to try to uncover the piracy, saying he couldn't get a babysitter. He later denied copying the film in a phone conversation to Mr Little.
At a later meeting with Mr Little, his partner and a private investigator he twice denied making a copy before eventually admitting he had.
However, he insisted he had taken it solely to watch with his family and had come back to work the next day to destroy the copy he made, Mr Little said.
Mr Little said Higgins would have made the copy when he was working a weekend shift, probably on October 1 and 2 2005, and found it odd that he would have returned to work on October 3 to destroy it given that he was rostered off that day.
The film's producer, John Barnett, told the court earlier today that he estimated the piracy cost investors at least $500,000.
Mr Barnett, the chief executive of South Pacific Pictures, said the pirated copies cost an estimated $300,000 in box office returns which would have gone directly to the company and another $200,000 in DVD sales.
Of that, $450,000 would have gone to pay back investors in the $3.8 million budget film such as the Film Commission and NZ On Air and $50,000 would have gone back to key cast and crew who worked on the film and the company.
He said the piracy was particularly costly in Manukau where box office returns were expected to be highest because of the film's Polynesian content, but in fact ranked 10th nationwide.
"People weren't going to see it in Manukau because they had already seen it (on pirated DVD)," Mr Barnett said.
The film eventually grossed about $4 million, though a significant part of that went to the film's distributors and cinema exhibitors.
Higgins' lawyer Louise Freyer questioned Mr Barnett about some of the differences between the ungraded submaster shown to the court, saying his client believed the version he copied had some missing dialogue.
Mr Barnett said some had been added during the editing process but most of the dialogue which viewers could clearly see being spoken should have been in the ungraded submaster.
The defended hearing before Judge Josephine Bouchier is expected to finish tomorrow.
- NZPA
