Teenager honoured as credits roll

The remarkable film-making talents of the late Cameron Duncan will live on in a West Auckland studio named after him.

He would have turned 19 yesterday had he not been struck down by cancer.

More than 100 friends, family and film industry luminaries gathered at Waitakere City Council's Henderson Valley Studios to hear Lord of the Rings maestros Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh extolling his brief but brilliant career.

The pair, in a message relayed to the assembly by Associate Arts Minister Judith Tizard, said Cameron was inspirational to them and they had never met anyone as "nutty" about film-making.

"As we got to know him we realised he was a kid who was never happier than when he was on a film set," they said. "Beneath the excitement, he had that most important of all film-maker's weapons - determination."

So it is fitting that he will remain at least in spirit on the sets of the many films Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey hopes will roll out of the Cameron Duncan Studio within the former apple and pear coolstore complex bought by the city council in 2002.

Cameron, who lost his battle with bone cancer late in 2003 aged 17, was from the western suburb of Massey and Mr Harvey said it was an honour to remember his significant contribution to film and Waitakere in such fashion.

Sharon Duncan said having a film studio named after her son was a wonderful gift from the city.

"It serves to encourage those in the film industry to aspire to achieve as Cameron did and in his words 'to do what they can, with what they have, where they are'."

Her son came to Jackson and Walsh's attention when he won a Fair Go advertising award aged just 13, and they struck up a close friendship with him soon after he was diagnosed with cancer in 2002.

They invited him to their Wellington studios whenever he was well enough to travel there, and he loved sitting with Jackson in his editing suite, studying his film-making techniques and apparently learning to make even bigger cinematic explosions than the Oscar-winner.

Walsh, who is Jackson's partner and co-produced the Lord of the Rings trilogy, dedicated to Cameron's memory a Golden Globe award she won last year for co-writing the theme song Into the West.

The teen died just as she and Jackson were finishing the final film of the trilogy, The Return of the King, and she penned the words of the song for him.

Cameron's own autobiographical short films DFK6498 and Strikezone are also included as extras on an extended-version DVD of The Return of the King, for sale to millions of fans worldwide.

In the final line of Strikezone, Cameron says: "The one thing I don't want to be is to be forgotten, and I think I've done a pretty good job of that."