It took some time to get here, though. "About six years ago I did a course in Filmbase in the IFI. I basically started making some contacts there and I came across a director called Damien De Burca (another promising young filmmaker. ) I produced his short film called 'Jack's Hat', which did very well." Stephen is being modest here. The short film, Stephen's fourth and the first by his own Maddog Productions, was screened at the Kerry, Miami, L.A and Nolita New York film festivals where it won the Spirit Of The Festival Award and secured distribution. But distribution is not the only reason film festivals exist. "The main thing when it comes to Ireland is more exposure and the idea is for people to spot film-makers and contact them for future projects. So other financiers, maybe the Film Board or the Arts Council, will approach the film-makers with the idea of doing a project together."

This is how Stephen took his next step. "When the film (Jack's Hat) was screened in New York, a student filmmaker asked me to produce his 45 minute film called 'The Headmaster, ' based on Padraig Pearse and the events leading up to the 1916 rising. I was getting ready to promote it and was back in Waterford when I realised my home city didn't have a festival. Around September of last year I started looking into it and started contacting various organisations about setting it up."

Stephen knows and understands how tricky it can be to get your name out there. During the course of the conversation, 'tough' wins first prize in the competition to describe how hard it is to break into the film industry, 'difficult' takes second. It's a close race. With this in mind, the festival is giving a lot of room to first-time, student and experimental film-makers with over forty shorts to be screened. "I know the pain and suffering in getting work out there. I just felt it was time that a festival was open to young film-makers." Just like Cork, Dublin and Galway, the Waterford festival - along with the growing number of indigenous and international feature film entries - encourages shorts, which Stephen believes to be paramount in the career of a burgeoning filmmaker. "It shows what a director can do, his/her style. It's your backbone, your stepping stone into the industry. It's quite important to develop a couple a shorts before even going down the feature road."

Stephen is not resting on his laurels. After the festival winds down, Stephen will seek funding for two short films and hopes to produce a WWII feature drama, 'Operation Eagle', a fictionalised take on the failed assassination of Hitler. He is also penning his own script The Lone Rangers, a madcap comedy about a group of young, broke Dublin northsiders who rob a bookies only to discover that gangsters own it. In the meantime, The Waterford Film Festival takes precedence and he's got his hands full, sounding breathless on the phone: "Ten films alone arrived in the last two days."

The Waterford Film Festival will run from the 16th to 18th of November.

www. waterfordfilmfestival. com