A RISING film-making star has been building international success after winning awards at the recent Utah Film Festival.

Michael Parker O’Brien - known professionally as Michael Winter - made his directorial debut at the world-renowned American film festival on January 11.

Originally from Staincross Common, the 22-year-old always had a passion for film and followed ambitions to the highly-rated Salford University, learning alongside film and television professionals at Media City.

For the past two years he’s been developing the hand-drawn short animated film Life Eternal and earlier this month managed to take it across the pond to show off his skills in the states.

He told the Chronicle: “The film was a long process, it took two years to make which is obviously a ridiculous amount of time for a short film.

“But at university you have tight deadlines, there’s about three months from the start to finish.

“We wanted to take time with it, make sure we were doing the topic justice and not rush.

“We were looking for festivals and saw Utah, which had a lot of animated films there, so we applied and were lucky enough to get in.

“There’s a particularly big film scene there - everyone kind of knows each other and everyone’s American so they couldn’t understand what we’re saying.

“But they were all really nice.”

Not only did Michael get to debut the film to an international audience, but also scooped up the ‘best animation’ award at the festival.

The young filmmaker is now working on developing the film - which follows the journey of a man dealing with the untimely death of his girlfriend - into a feature length project.

His dad, Peter Parker, added: “We’re very proud of him, extremely proud.”