Belfast director Aoife McArdle is not one for the limelight, but quietly and diligently she has amassed a body of quality work that speaks for itself.
When she spoke to Belfast Live, Aoife said she rarely did interviews and that the real joy for her was being immersed in her work.
It's a career that has been marked by hard work, but has led to working with musical and film luminaries like Coldplay, U2, Christopher Walken, Patricia Arquette, Ben Stiller and Cillian Murphy to name but a few.
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Born in Dartford outside London, Aoife's parents moved the family to Omagh when she was six-years-old and she said the love of film and film-making had already started from there.
She lapped up the black and white and alternative films her parents showed her and it led to her pursuing English Literature at Trinity College in Dublin.
Joining the photography club while she was there, she also indulged her love for creating films.
"I started to make small ones, on like mini-DV and Super 8 while I was there and managed to get into a Masters course in England, which specialised in film and video production and that was a year long," she said.
"I really immersed myself in those worlds of shooting, editing and lighting and you had to do that for everyone else's work too, so it kind of threw you in at the deep end in a great way.
"I met some really good friends there and we decided to start our own collective, so we moved to London together and we had no money, We were working runner jobs and so on, but then doing our own stuff at nights and weekends."
In typically understated fashion, Aoife then explains that she met the lead singer of the band Bloc Party, Kele Okereke and persuaded his management to allow them to make a music video for the band.
"I had also then after a while started working in a documentary company as a runner but I worked my way up to doing filming, producing and directing bits and pieces, so I sort of used all these things when I went out on my own as a director after the collective," she added.
"That was about 2010 or 2011 - the videos for smaller artists were good because they were very narrative-led and you got creative control, the beauty of them is that you really learn to conceptualise and come up with ideas.
"Putting my videos up on Vimeo, at the time that was absolutely instrumental for a lot of young filmmakers, and they gave me quite a lot of staff picks and my work started to get noticed and from there production companies started to contact me about representing me."
She also took on commercial work for brands like Nike and Honda, which allowed her to pay off her university debts but also to hone the technical side of her skills and to gain directing experience.
Aoife's work with another director also led to her being recommended to Ben Stiller as a director for the series Severance on Apple TV.
The dystopian series explores the idea of severing your work and personal personas, so that one has no memory of the other and the complications and dilemmas that come with that.
"As soon as I read the script, I was really into it, I felt it was very me in a way that very few things are," she said.
"I loved that it was so idiosyncratic, that it was an underdog story, that it was about people who were escaping trauma but ultimately the parallel reality of people wanting to sever their everyday lives from their working lives.
"The tragicomedy of that is very appealing to me because it's probably what a lot of us want to do sometimes, to not have one traumatise the other.
"The themes of what it means to be a work drone, working for this faceless machine, I think a lot of us feel like that way a lot of the time, especially any one of us who has done a job we don't like.
"There's so many moral questions that the show explores with that idea too."
The show has been a runaway success, garnering 14 Emmy nominations for its first season and the Directors Guild of America (voted for by other directors), nominating Aoife in the Dramatic Series category for her directorial work.
"I would never have dreamt that I would ever be anywhere near Hollywood, its funny, but it's just getting the opportunity to work with such incredible actors," she said.
"Christopher Walken, Patricia Arquette, they're just actors I've admired for so long, but you don't have time to be starstruck, it's such an intense way of working.
"Good TV drama takes every second of your time, so you don't really have time to think about how it is to be working with these big names until after it's all done.
"I want to work with people I respect and I've said yes when those opportunities come up and sometimes you say no when opportunities come up.
"You curate your own career in a way and you realise you have to do that."
Aoife said it helped that she lives in Belfast and can afford to pursue projects she is truly passionate about, rather than worrying about having to take on extra work to pay the bills that would exist in a pricier city.
Her affection for the city is not hard to pick up on and she speaks with genuine warmth about the joys of being able to work from Belfast.
"I just really love being here, near my family and friends, I really crave it and I especially really love Belfast," she added.
"Ever since Game of Thrones too, there's so much talent here and I would love to see more productions happening in Belfast.
"I think the more of those people that are in the industry, the better it'll be, because people here have such a unique perspective and sense of humour and that makes for brilliant storytelling.
"I think that's going to happen too."
There were warm words too for the talent from these isles being recognised by The Academy Awards and elsewhere.
"They're all so talented and it's amazing to see that the best talent out there at the minute is from Ireland, it's so exciting," she said.
"Both Barry Keoghan and Paul Mescal were amazing in those films, (Banshees of Inisherin and Aftersun), and Kerry Condon (Banshees of Inisherin).
"Jessie Buckley, she's not nominated but she should be, she's an extraordinary actress, I just think everything I see her in, she blows my mind.
"Fingers crossed they all win!".
As for what's next for Aoife, she's still very busy and is working on projects of her own.
"I'm doing some TV drama again in New York and I'm also developing my own projects, films that I'm very determined to get up and running properly soon," she said.
"One of them is more of a horror, psychological horror and the other one is a drama."
You can see more of Aoife McArdle's directorial work here.
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