Gallowglass Pictures - Eamon McElwee Biography

EAMON McELWEE - Managing and Creative Director

While studying communications, EAMON McELWEE won the Bank of Ireland sponsored award for Radio Documentary in 1987. In 1988 he joined Windmill Lane Pictures working for the next three years in online television post-production and then as a video editor in the freelance market.

Eamon was a producer and founder member of Glasshouse Productions theatre company. He has written, compiled and presented documentaries for RTE Radio 1 to critical acclaim, in addition to contributing short features to a variety of RTE Radio programmes.

He spent a year as animation producer of the £2M, 10 X TV half-hour animation series "The Sign of the Fish" featuring Ben Kingsley for Setanta Studios, prior to spending a further 15 months as producer with Raytown Pictures Ltd.

Eamon is currently owner and managing director of Gallowglass Pictures Ltd. established in 1998 to produce high quality documentaries, docusoap and series for world-wide television and video distribution.

Based in Dublin, Gallowglass is now an established independent international factual production company, recently awarded EU Media Plus development funding, with several hundred thousand Euros in project funds promised from Ireland, UK and Europe across a variety of developed projects in collaboration with leading international co-producers including RDF international (UK) and Hof Film Productions (NL).

Eamon has written, produced and directed internationally distributed documentary projects including;
"From Clare to Here", "TRAVELLERS - the True Bards of Ireland", “SOLO in SE ASIA”, "Temple Bar Nights", "Stratford Strategy", "Across Boundaries", "Access-All-Areas", "AIB 2000", "Paddy Moriyasu", "Swingers", "No Need to Dream", "People Who Won't Commit" and "TRIBUTES".

He has attended many international markets and festivals for Gallowglass, developing a worldwide network of funding and production contacts. In 2001 he pitched the Irish-Japanese documentary, "Paddy Moriyasu" at Hot Docs in Toronto before an audience of 150 international producers and funders. This documentary was successfully completed in June 2002.

Eamon participated in the MEDIA Film Business School in Spain and MEDIA Television Business School in Germany , which both promote and develop international co-production.

He has also participated in the STI Documentary Directors Workshop in Feb 2001 featuring some of the greats of international documentary including; DA Pennebaker, Chris Hegadus, John T. Davis, Kim Longinotto, Jon Bang Carlsen and a further workshop with Albert Maysales. He also successfully completed an STI DV Director's programme in 2001.

Eamon is a founding organiser of the Irish Documentary Forum (in association with Screen Producers Ireland). His industrial film for and Allied Irish Bank shot in Poland and New York, recently beat the AA and the British Army to win a UK Award for industrial films.

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