However, he says the emergence of new technologies - and a post-COVID shift in attitudes - has kicked off a boom for productions in the region.

On the back of award-winning 2021 documentary Inferno, the ambitious 25-year-old director is now gearing up to shoot a live-action film on the streets of his hometown.

"I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker as a profession from about 12 ... [but I thought] I would probably have to move away and develop a career elsewhere," Mr Rodwell said.

"A lot of the infrastructure was metropolitan based and a lot of the networking opportunities ... were in Sydney and Melbourne, but now they're branching out for a tree change."

His Inferno debut told the story of firefighters on the front-line of the 2018 bushfires at Mount Canobolas, and won numerous awards at domestic and international film festivals.

In 2022 Mr Rodwell was awarded the Young Citizen of the Year award by Orange City Council for the project, and earlier this week state member Phil Donato noted his work at the Community Recognition Presentation in Lucknow.

The upcoming live-action short film is targeting a 2023 release, and will reportedly be funded, cast, shot, and edited entirely in Orange - something seen as monumentally difficult just a few years ago.

"It will be a high-end sort of production, we're aware of how ambitious this product will be but our intention is to go big or go home essentially," Mr Rodwell explained.

"[We want to] get above the saturation of what else is being done in short film circles and one of the beautiful things about it will be we'll be making it in Orange, and that will mean an incredible amount for the community."

While the plot is being kept under tight wraps for now, it's believed the pyrotechnic themes of his earlier work may be revived in some capacity.

So how did the "born and bred" Orange boy get here? He says while practical opportunities were thin on the ground at school, teachers at CRTHS worked hard to nurture his passion:

"[I had] lots of mentors who really sort of recognised the emergence of technology to make film making a more viable career ... who said 'do a film project for design and technology.'"

Fresh from graduation, he went into advertisement production; doing work for the ambulance service, police, education department, and Fire and Rescue NSW.

"I loved the art behind it, I loved the craft ... It wasn't really about the movie magic side, I just really loved the mechanisms that go on behind the scenes," he revealed.

It was while on this assignment that he found himself shadowing firefighters during one of the region's worst natural disasters.

"When we were evaluating the footage from the bushfire, I realised there was something very special about the imagery and that it deserved to be a film rather than a commercial," he told If.com at the time.

"It almost felt like we would have been throwing an opportunity away by doing a commercial, so [the RFS] agreed to let me make it as a film."

Some of the footage from Inferno - which took three years to finish - was repackaged by the ABC for its 2021 series Fires, and off the back of this he set to work planning his next project.

"Originally you had to be a bit of an entrepreneur, you had to bring in your own resources and had to find to get things made out here ... The challenges are becoming a lot more narrow," he said.

"... It's just a really exciting place to be doing this - there are many production companies based here now, and they do a lot of genre films for international clients such as Netflix.

"There's a great contingency of creatives [in Orange], so we're just really trying to prove that our next project will be much more of a career opportunity for local talent while telling a local story."

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