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EDITION 5
In a way, it’s where I’ve been all my life - between the magic and the darkness. There is so much horror in the world but you also see the most magical things.
Juan Carlos Castaneda
A director/cinematographer makes documentaries about extreme hardship all over the world. Now he is writing fiction; horrific and beautiful fantasy which shatters the way we see our heroes. Actually, the way we see our superheroes. Meet Juan Carlos Castaneda, creator of upcoming tv series, ‘American Diablo’.
Normally, a superhero fights to keep the status quo, because we think our society’s great, it’s working. The villain comes along and wants to destroy our world, and the superhero saves it. But in my take, our world is already fucked, and we don’t need bad guys because they’re already here running the show, and the whole system is broken. My superhero comes in unapologetically to take out anything and anyone. I mean, she’s almost a villain in herself, depending on who’s seeing her.
Juan, or ‘Caster’, as he is known (his film company Human Pictures is made up of three guys all named Juan) had a childhood which was split between Colombia and Miami. In Colombia, Caster loved to watch movies by himself, and he recalls sitting in movie theatres while bombs went off down the street.
Colombia has always been very violent, and you normalise it. I was born in 1977, in the middle of a full-blown civil war which lasted 52 years. Then in the 80’s and 90’s another war began with (Colombian drug lord) Pablo Escobar. Bombs were going off all the time.
As you grow up, you see super rich, super poor, super this, super that. You learn how unjust societies are. I don’t really believe in left and right. For me, it’s the Haves and the Have Nots.
Caster cites his mother as being the eyes through which he saw the world.
She’s the person directly responsible for me having sensitivity to anything. You know, it’s a single-mom-only-child story, we didn’t have a lot of money. It’s always been her and me. I have so many anecdotes about my mom. Once when I was a kid, we were driving through Nashville. For some reason she got us into a square dance contest. Now my mom is extremely Colombian, she was like: Ah, cookies if we win a prize! And we won the prize! It was 200 cookies. I remember the rest of the road trip just eating cookies, 200 cookies all the way up to New York.
Caster took on his mother’s joie de vivre. Spun with his own artistry it would put him on a plane to Australia.
By the time I was twelve I knew I would be an artist. I was drawing a lot, writing, reading. I loved music but it was too mathematical for me. Then I watched ‘Immortal Beloved’, the movie about Beethoven. There’s a scene where they define music. Beethoven called it hypnotism, that music is a way to transport the listener into the mind of the composer. If you want them to dance, you make them dance. If you want them to cry, you make them cry. I was taken by his definition, but I realised I was more taken by the movie experience. I started studying photography and by the time I was sixteen I knew I needed to be a filmmaker.
Juan Mejia, Caster’s best friend in high school, was a big influence.
Juan opened my mind to social justice, and the idea that you can actually do something about it. When we were 15 years old, we daydreamed about creating a company to change the world. I said, “I want to do it with a camera”. Juan wanted to study Anthropology at university, and he did that.
Caster took two degrees at RMIT in Melbourne, in Photography and Animation.
I wanted my college experience to be outside the U.S. It had to be an English or Spanish-speaking country, so I was thinking of England, Spain, Australia. I knew nothing about Australia! It was a blank. I thought: that’s perfect!
My first artistic work was claymation. I was going to send it with my applications. When I was halfway done with the film I ran out of money, so I finished it with a videocam. So my stop-motion (animation) was a mixture of 8mm film and video camera work. It was a mess. But RMIT accepted me! When I eventually asked them why they chose me, they said, “We loved how you mixed medias.” I told them it was just because I ran out of money. They said yes, it was the resourcefulness that they loved.
Despite the distance Caster and Juan Mejia stayed in touch, and worked together on Caster’s RMIT thesis.
Colombia was in a state of civil war and we were asking ourselves: what is going to happen there after the war ends? We decided to make a documentary about the youth in El Salvador. Civil war had torn that country, and we spent a couple of months filming what it was like to be a young person living there after the war. Juan directed while I filmed, and was our first project as friends, and as Human Pictures.
Before returning to the U.S., Caster travelled as much as he could. I went all over, within Australia and to Asia, Africa and Europe. Australia is so far that you can literally take any route around the world. By the time I came back to Miami, I felt how small the world is. How close and connected everything is and that everywhere, people are the same. They behave the same way, and their problems are universal.
Caster went to Chapman University in California for his MFA, studying Directing, Cinematography and Animation. I still loved animation and took extra classes in 3D and everything, just for my inner geek.
The two Juans were joined by a third, Juan Yepes, and in the early 2000s the film company Human Pictures was officially formed. (Note that the company email is somejuan@humanpictures.com).
Juan Yepes (Juancho) is the spine of our company. Juan Mejia and I indeed dreamed about creating Human Pictures, but Juancho (who is a civil and electronics engineer) enabled it to happen. He deals with the business, taxes, client emails, and all the other stuff so that Juan and I get a chance to create. In other words, without Juancho, Human Pictures would have remained in the ether of our dreams.
At the start everyone had to freelance other jobs to survive, but they protected their brand. Human Pictures became known for visually compelling documentaries, created with intelligence and empathy.
Then in 2010, Human Pictures was commissioned by the United Nations to make a tv commercial about racism against black women in Colombia.
They specifically wanted a film company which would be sensitive to the subject matter, and we were known for making documentaries about war and racism in Colombia. The tv commercial was shown in Colombia, and it was in Spanish. We were getting grants and other income, but being commissioned by the UN was the first time we actually got paid to make a film.
Human Pictures now makes films for the United Nations, Malteser International (part of the 800-year-old charity organisation, the Order of Malta) and the Equal Justice Initiative in the U.S.
Caster still had an inner battle. He recalled his RMIT professor.
The day after I landed in Melbourne I went to the university and found one of my professors. He said, “You left behind your whole life to come here. So what do you want to say that’s so damned important?” I was 18 when I got to Australia, and when I left I still didn’t really know what I wanted to say.
Human Pictures makes documentaries that hopefully help someone. But I have always wanted to write fiction. Sometimes I would feel almost guilty because I want to talk about wizards and magic! How can I do that when all these people are starving and dying, or there is a war and people are suffering?
We shot a feature documentary called ‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’ over a period of four years in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It was a lot of camping, going into the countryside and seeing crazy stuff. I was saying to myself: I’m very lucky. I’m working with my best friends, it’s a great experience that not everyone gets to have. But I also felt like my life is passing by and I’m not doing what I want. I mean, how much older do I have to be before I start doing MY films? I’m good at documentaries, but that doesn’t mean it’s what I should be doing.
I realised that I had to start doing my own fiction, and my fiction will be based on all the craziness that I have seen. I will take the darkness and the reality that I see every day in my documentaries, and unify it with my own fiction. Then I will take it somewhere else. I will talk about these human issues which are important to me, but not through the lens of a documentary. It will be like putting vitamins into ice cream.
In early 2020 Continuance Pictures was accepting submissions for its script-writing contest, and Caster submitted one for a film called ‘Miami Gothic’.
‘Miami Gothic’ is surreal, and very dark. The main character is an immigrant who is deaf, and who needs to find her voice. She’s seen as a most undesirable person, in her society and in ours. But she’s the one that ends up becoming a superhero.
Late last year Caster received an email from Continuance Pictures co-founders David Gim and Tristan Barr about developing the idea.
I’d totally forgotten about ‘Miami Gothic’ since I’d sent it pre-Covid. After Covid hit it was like - just forget everything. All the theatres were closed and everybody was indoors watching movies and bingeing everything like crazy.
In response to that, Caster had written a bible - an outline for a television series - based on the same story. He called it ‘American Diablo’.
I showed that to David and Tristan and they said, “We have to make ‘American Diablo’. That’s the one.”
Caster has chosen an actress who is deaf to play the lead in ‘American Diablo’.
It’s not about just giving a chance to someone who is deaf. No. If I’m making a film about deaf people I want them to teach me. I want to represent the deaf community as well as possible, without making it about being deaf. So someone who has watched the series will recall, ‘Oh yeah, she was deaf,’ but it’s not a big deal. That’s normalising, and that’s how you reach true equality. The actress for ‘American Diablo’ is Latina, with dark hair, and of Puerto Rican background.
As they begin a new partnership, Caster summarised his relationship with Continuance within the grander scheme of things.
The most important thing I get from talking with David and Tristan, is that they’re not so interested in the film itself, as in the filming. They want to make a bond, almost like casting for a friend. You want to find someone who you can collaborate with artistically, but at the end of the day you can also have some beers, and just enjoy what you’re doing. These guys are definitely on the same wavelength. It’s not just about the one movie. We’re dedicated to doing this forever. Until we can’t.
Juan Carlos Castaneda
FEBRUARY 3 , 2021/ by J. FUnk (Editor)
EDITION 4
“Self-Discovery"“I find it interesting to delve in to see what is really dormant within us. It’s sometimes scary, it’s sometimes relatable. I have always been pulled into stories which are grounded by character. I think sometimes I’m on my own self-discovery, it’s like having a hard conversation with yourself.“
Amanda Kaye.
Writer/Director Amanda Kaye studied film production and graduated with honours from Griffith University’s Film School in Queensland, Australia. Upon graduation Amanda built a solid foundation in documentary filmmaking with award-winning documentarians, before stepping into the world of narrative filmmaking.
I always knew I would go to film school. It felt like a natural way of expression that probably helped me as a child. When I was little, I was a very slow reader. It just took me forever to read a book. Film on the other hand was so immediate! It’s funny, I’ve been thinking about that lately, that I never used to read books. Now I’m writing and discovering who I am in my own voice, rather than through the voices of others, in terms of writing style.
When I was in high school I wrote stories that reflected my own life. I used different characters to express things that were going on with me, it was almost like seeing different sides of myself interacting. (I’m making myself sound very psychotic!) The overweight, shy kid that got bullied. It was that very typical school life. I had my own types of dialogues, monologues almost. I would write a scene and think, what did I want to say in this scene? If I couldn’t stand up for myself at school, I would write a scene where someone stood up for themselves. Having these feelings which I didn’t know how to express, I realised that film was the way I understood communication.
Amanda isn’t interested in making films that give us the warm fuzzies. She’s looking for the essence of who we are, especially what isn’t on show.
As filmmakers we are fully responsible for how audiences feel and how we choose to play with that. Audiences are not only entertained, they are sometimes invited to self-reflect. Sometimes we laugh because we’re uncomfortable and we don’t know how to compute a scene.
Amanda’s award-winning short film ‘Norm’, a dark comedy, is being thematically extended into a tv series with Continuance Pictures.
I’m now working with David Gim, a head producer/writer from Continuance to develop ‘Norm’ into a series, which is now called ‘Merv’. It’s about a seemingly ordinary man from the midwest in America from the 90's who accidentally becomes a serial killer but then falls in love with being a serial killer. The idea is that we are all capable of murder. There’s a line for everyone which can be crossed and it’s scary to discover what that is for yourself.
You can look at someone and assume the line at the end of Psycho. ‘Oh, he would never hurt a fly’. But the fact is, sometimes they do want to hurt the fly. We practise social categorisation to simplify our lives, but we are also damaging certain types of people. It gives us the illusion that we understand people but we really don’t know them. We also have that fight within us, the group versus the individual. So Merv is an exploration of that, and the real dormant ‘what is within us’ can be quite scary. The tone of the series will be dark comedy. So things can be intriguing and comical on the surface and yet make us feel uncomfortable. Like placing people in a situation and things go wrong. You have an action sequence and things are expected to go right. But what if things fail? We are human. What happens then?
Creating a story is about structure and what the film or tv series aims to do. Find a nice dance with the audience and don’t give all the information straight away. Decide when and how to provide information, and from whose perspective. I’m learning what it is that I’m actually trying to communicate, so in that respect I am answering myself. The process itself is enjoyable. I might not know from the start how a new project will end, but for me, creating a script is for understanding characters. They naturally show you how the story should progress, if you understand them well enough.
Making documentaries for several years was great grounding for Amanda in terms of developing insight into the human condition. She now documents selectively.
Documentary was a beautiful way to enter the industry. It was intriguing, and the art form is really about a filmmaker connecting with an actual person and building trust. I am making a documentary about a man named Damian McCoy. I feel selfish making it because it’s my way of growing myself by knowing someone like him, and I want so many other people to know about him. He was born able-bodied, was hit by a car, and he developed hemiplegic cerebral palsy, which means the right side of his body doesn’t work properly. His mother helped rehabilitate him, but while driving him to one of his appointments at age 11, the car rolled and his mother died next to him. Damian struggled as his main supporter in life wasn’t there anymore. He has now decided his calling in life is to be an actor, to use his tragic past as a way of self-expression and to find ways to represent people with disabilities, as a disabled person in films. There is a new movement to have certain people represent themselves in film and he’s very excited to be able to do that. He models too. You meet Damian and you think, ‘What do I have to complain about?’ He’s doing it, you know? We go on about living our dreams. You know, if you are sitting still and doing nothing, you might as well be dying.
Damian says, ‘I don’t want my mother’s hard work being my main supporter in life to go to waste.’ At age 40 he realises that he needs to be assertive, to stand up for yourself and do what you want despite what others might say. He actually reminds me of my mother, who passed away as well. He says in a way, we are doing it for our mums. My mother also believed that you shouldn’t allow yourself to be defined by others. You still strive and do things. This documentary is a conversation about the positions that people with disabilities have in our society and why they shouldn’t be dismissed. When people overly insist on helping Damian, the assumption is that he can’t do anything, and that is hurtful.
Amanda is also filming a true drama short film in January. It is about a woman with a 5-year-old daughter, who believes that she isn’t meant to be a mother and that her child could have a better life with someone else.
The film has a very dominant female cast, and addresses what we do to ourselves as women; what we tell ourselves, what society tells us. We can plan to be a parent, we can abort or put a child up for adoption. But what if you’ve made a choice to keep the child and later realise you’ve made the wrong decision. Society tells us this is not acceptable and this film is creating a conversation about that. Many of the cast involved are people who have experienced the different facets this film addresses, building a strong grounding for the film.
Amanda is very excited about a feature film concept which was shortlisted for the RIDE initiative with Screen Queensland.
I’m absolutely in love with this feature film, it is the next one that I have in my sights to get done! I was shortlisted, and am still developing it. The film is a black comedy about a seventy-year-old Mother Superior who realises she’s a lesbian. She forms what she believes is a loving relationship with a female prostitute, who actually teaches her what true love is. There is conflict and contrast, but fundamentally we are looking inside these people, finding ways to relate, connect and have dialogue with people you don’t think you could ever have dialogue with.
Amanda said film is her life and no matter how hard it is to make films, it is harder to not make them.
There was a period where ‘the other work’ overtook my life, and I had to stop film work for about three years. That ate away at me and I said ‘no more’. Film is part of who I am. There is a burning feeling that I have to do it. I always liken making a film to going to war. You have your band of brothers next to you and you’re hoping to go in and do it, and survive at the end. But you need to make sure everyone who is in your team is fighting for the same thing. You’re all in for the same cause. Whenever I look at a film we have made, I know we say it’s my thoughts and my expressions but it is a collaboration and we work as a group to create something. It becomes ‘our piece’ by the end.
My advice to new filmmakers is that it comes down to what you truly want to do. Are you a writer or a director? Are you a cinematographer? Be open to understanding how you can tell stories through those different mediums. How can you tell stories through sound versus cinematography? As a director how do you incorporate them both. Have a real curiosity to push the boundaries within yourself but also understand your style. My journey of discovery is really about understanding my style. How do I best feel I can communicate something? It’s okay to fail, you don’t have to be Martin Scorsese straight off. But learn and develop. The rules are learnt, they all come from somewhere. Understand how you as a person want to communicate a story. I am all about communication and expression!
DECEMBER 10 , 2020/ by J. FUnk (Editor)
EDITION 3
“GIANTS”
“I love the madness of filmmaking! I love the circus of arriving in a location with trucks and ridiculous equipment. Things come out, you collectively pull off this amazing feat and then it all goes back in the truck and you drive away! Then there’s the catharsis that comes from telling a very satisfying story.”
EDDY BELL, filmmaker.
Sydney-based Eddy Bell has an established career making commercials and has several award-winning short films to his name. In talking about his work, Eddy was so keen to attribute credit where it is due, and his well-considered words made it easy to see why people let him walk into their world, to tell a story about them.
“As directors, we are Jack of all trades, masters of none,” he said. “We know a bit about every department: cameras, sound, performance, arts department design. Just enough to be able to make sure that the incredibly talented people you put in the heads of those departments are moving in the same direction.”
What about trying to recreate what’s in your mind, I asked. But he wasn’t having any of it. “I think the concept of a director’s vision closes down the possibilities of what could be from all the talented people you have around you! If you are just focussed on what’s in your head, the possibilities for greatness from other people are just completely diminished.”
Eddy spoke about ‘Giants’, his most recent short film, ‘Giants’ is a story about a family in the Australian outback and what they do to survive a drought. “I came in to see the first cut, and my editor had created that end sequence. I was like: Oh my God, I can’t do this. I can’t kill another cow at the end of a film. But it was so fitting, and it felt so thematically right that I thought well, that’s the film. I often think that films have a life of their own, and that sequence which my editor cut was what it needed to be. That end scene was shot on the first trip. It was right in the middle of the drought, in the worst parts. From that end scene I kept going back out there and reverse engineering this story into that film. We waited for the drought to break so that we could shoot some greener parts. Over a period of 18 months we learned more about the community and what was happening, and it started to shape that story.”
Eddy was in school in Armidale in New South Wales, and has friends on properties out there.
“A guy I went to school with, Stegs, was one of the producers. He’s a school counsellor and he’d never had anything to do with filmmaking before. But I came out and shot this thing on his property and said things like: ‘We need a gun, and a ute, and we need all of these things, and I need a cast! Plus 200 cattle in the yards over there…’ and amazingly he just made all these things happen. So that’s the connection, and the story’s true of his family.”
Eddy’s childhood was split between urban and rural living. “My parents were divorced when I was about one so I always had split homes. My dad had a property up on the North Coast so half the time we had this rural, farm lifestyle with horses and we were grubby farm kids. My mother lived in the inner West suburbs of Sydney so I also had this little skater kid life in Sydney.”
He was even a junior yee-haw on the NSW North Coast Rodeo Bull Riding circuit.
“I would be in inner city homeboy tracksuits, and the guy on the microphone would be saying: ‘and next up on bull number 7 we have Eddy Bell from… Balmain in Sydney!’ So I feel that I can exist easily in both worlds. Inner city, I guess that’s part of the urban filmmaking side, and I obviously feel really comfortable shooting films in the outback.”
In the case of (multiple award-winning short film) ‘Grey Bull’ the story was shaped by our casting process,” Eddy continued. “When I make a film, often I go into a world that I don’t necessarily come from, or I feel I don’t have enough knowledge about. So with ‘Grey Bull’, the process was about understanding immigration in Australia and also getting to know the South Sudanese community in Melbourne.”
The crew attended South Sudanese events for three months, getting invited to a funeral which was a two thousand person event in a grand hall. “We were in there as guests of a family and, as that happened, those actors and the family who are in the film and who are a real family - they started to shape the script, and we would fold in their story and their culture and their tribe. Specific things from their tribe would come back into everything that’s in ‘Grey Bull’. It’s very much shaped by that experience of casting and meeting people.”
Both stories are about families coping with life’s adversity. “We often comment that filmmakers tell the same story over and over again,” Eddy said. “Often my stories are about fathers and sons or fathers and daughters, and about legacy: what do we pass on, of ourselves to the next generation? Incredibly, ‘Grey Bull’ and ‘Giants’ are the same film, just with different humans in them. I don’t know how, but it was not intentional!”
“I think there’s an exciting life for that film, although so much has happened in the world since we made it. We’ve now been through bush fires and a pandemic. The drought seems so long ago! But I think it’s all tied together, all these things happening are part of a changing world, and it will be interesting to acknowledge it with that film.”
Eddy was almost 30 before daring to acknowledge that he had it in him to tell a good story.
“In my twenties I hosted karaoke, went out a lot, set up jumping castles. I never really took myself seriously until I had one of those Saturn returns. I got to the end of my twenties and thought: well, who am I?”
“I had worked on film sets, but nowhere near the camera. I’d been a runner and worked all of the ‘bottom of the call sheet’ jobs on a film set. I did that for eight years before deciding to go to film school. Then I went to VCA (Victorian College of the Arts) as a mature-aged student, and loved it.”
“I’d had just enough life experience and understanding of the world to know how special the experience was, to be able to take three years to study film, sit in a classroom and talk to people. It just shifted things for me, and gave me permission to see myself as somebody who had a brain and a voice, and was worthy of using it.”
Once he found his voice, there was a lot to say.
“Scripts are so intricate, like the workings of a clock! I love the structure of screenwriting and think I put too much in my shorts. There’s so much going on in the theme, the process of distillation is really quite difficult. ‘Giants’ and ‘Grey Bull’ are jam packed, there’s so much going on in my head that may not even register with the audience. I’m hoping in the next stage of my career as I expand to tv and longer form projects that these stories will fit better in the format.”
Eddy is working with Continuance Pictures on a tv series called ‘One Of Us!’. It’s a black comedy which is a thematic extension of ‘Grey Bull’.
“‘One Of Us!’ takes place in a world where an alternative to offshore detention is being trialled and the government is releasing refugees into small country towns. So this particular town is an ex-mining town that is going under. It’s essentially just a motel and a petrol station. The mine’s shut and the town is dying. They take up a contract, and an influx of people from these offshore detention centres come to what is essentially a motel in the middle of nowhere.”
Like ‘Grey Bull’, this comedy is about assimilation and what we ask people to leave at the door when they come to a new country. Often, the previous experience (of new migrants) and what they bring to this world is just, if not even more, interesting and colourful and important.
“‘One Of Us’ is very much in the early stages. I feel really comfortable creating satire around the motel, and the town and the Australians that are welcoming these people into their town. But we need a co-creator who’s going to come onboard and be able to really push the other side of the story.”
Regarding the creative process, Eddy said it’s good to have many projects on the go at different stages of development, to be able to jump from one to another.
“You get to a point where you’re always waiting for a response from people, or you’re waiting for a draft. So it’s great to be able to jump from project to project. For example, maybe I’ve done a draft, and I need to walk away from it for two weeks. So I’m going to go and do something on Tristan’s project over there. Elsewhere we’re waiting for the rights of a book to become available so that one’s sort of parked. That kind of thing.”
Eddy said the emergence of streamers and multiple distribution channels for entertainment, and in his case even the gig economy, is good for creative collaboration.
“There’s this new generation where people are less inclined to be tied down to a contract or a single employer. I want to actually be talking and networking with people all over the industry. If there are multiple avenues of opportunity, then we’re no longer competing with each other for one spot. We’re supporting each other to find all of those opportunities.”
Eddy also said creatives are acting on their own initiative rather than waiting for an invitation to see their work.
“I don’t want to wait around for someone to tell me that it’s okay for me to have a career, this idea of the ‘Hollywood break’ where somebody is going to give you an opportunity and make it happen for you. You don’t have to wait around for an old relationship between a network and a big established production company to give you the green light. It used to be that there were these big companies who were the only ones which dealt with Channels 9, 10 and 7. This has changed.”
“I think there’s a lot of women filmmakers out there who are now saying, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to be sitting around waiting for you to give me the green light to have opportunity. I’m going to go out there and I’m going to take it.’”
Eddy described being a producer on somebody else’s project at the beginning of the year.
“This was a story about domestic violence, from a girl who had experienced it directly herself. Now, I could never tell that story with any authenticity. But the fact that I had been able to support somebody else’s story (being a producer) meant that there is a bit of personal growth that I could have. I don’t need to be the creative lead on everything that I’m a part of. It’s a privilege to be part of diversity. But I think also at the same time you have to be aware of not dictating the terms of that diversity, and understanding what kind of role you can play authentically in telling diverse stories.”
“I love that Continuance has a similar ethos about wanting to be a part of lots of films being made, and tv, and just making things happen. I want all of these projects to get going, and I want the community that we create here to be making lots of films. So I’m going to support your project, you’re going to support my project, as a team we’ll collectively get things happening together, and we’ll leave the ego at the door. No more, ‘...this is my creative initiative… I’m going to be the director…I’m the writer…’
“There’s this real sense of: Let’s be the generation that makes 60 films, not two.”
November 2, 2020 by. J. Funk (Editor)
EDITION 2
“A BIG STEP”SIAN LAYCOCK AND JOEL STEPHEN FLEMING PEN COMEDY SERIES ‘THE C WORD’
‘The C Word’ is a Brisbane-based comedy series written by Sian Laycock and Joel Stephen Fleming, which is in development with Continuance Pictures and backed by Screen Australia.
“Essentially ‘The C Word’ is a comedy drama,” said Sian, a writer/art director. “Continuance Pictures helped us with our application to Screen Australia. At the moment we are looking at six, half hour episodes for a first series.”
Continuance co-founder Tristan Barr said, “It’s just come out of development with Screen Australia. We received funding for a writers’ room, and also to have the script edited. The writers’ room included Julie Eckersley, who notably produced ‘The Family Law’, and Roger Monk, an experienced writer/producer who is writing a Netflix series at the moment. He is the script editor. Writer/director Leela Varghese, whose short film ‘Crush’ won Best Screenplay at Tropfest 2019, was also in the writers’ room.
“Like the recent series ‘Search Party’, this kind of series is a funny and stark look at the issues and dramas millennials face,” Tristan continued. “Something we’ve been assessing is how to draw empathy with a character that has behaved unethically. It’s a big question that we’ve been able to address in our writers’ room, and the script editing will be a big part of that.”
Here’s the logline:
Siobhan is a 20-something, single, aspiring poet, who is searching for her place in the world. In her desperate quest for transformation she tells a terrible lie that will change her life forever.
The writers’ room via Zoom lasted five days. “It was our first professional writers’ room,” said Joel Stephen Fleming, writer/director, 13th Street Films.
“We’ve done it before with emerging practitioners, but with these guys it was on a different level. Julie was in Melbourne, Roger in NSW and Leela was in Adelaide. They literally called it ‘Interrogating Your Idea’ and it really is like the police pulling apart your story! The tricky thing is you’re developing this idea, and it’s changing, in the room, every day. They ask you how a character is going to react to something. But by Thursday, that character’s reaction is different from what it would have been on Monday.”
“We’re so new to the whole tv writing thing,” Sian said. “It’s such a big step for us, so it was important for us to show what we do. We stuck to our guns on some things that we are passionate about. When you have your own idea you are going to be precious about it, saying exactly how you want it to be. But we both found this to be a really eye-opening experience.”
“Julie talked about ‘The North Star’ in astrology - how it guides you home,” Joel continued. “She said, ‘Know what your North Star is, what the show is about. Then you can always come back to that one thing.’ Once we had that, it really helped with the writing process. It was a great tool to guide the overall feeling, drive and purpose of the show.”
“By the end of the week we had a much clearer picture of what we were trying to say,” Sian said. “They have so much experience, and they had great ideas. It’s funny, at some point it felt like a therapy session where everyone was sharing different stories from their lives. It was nice, and you can draw a lot from other people’s experiences. We ended up with a lot more than the sum of our own two brains. There was also some vulnerability, which maybe I found a bit challenging since I’m not really out there. But it was good. If you can get to that point then it helps the writing. The tone was set really well and we felt very looked after.”
Tristan was keen to highlight the location of ‘The C Word’.
“It’s really a Brisbane-focused story. We would look to gain partnerships with Screen Australia or Screen Queensland, and make it a really iconic Brisbane series. The writing introduces the Brisbane music scene, which is renowned - several top Australian bands come from up here. It’s something we’re including which is iconically Queensland.
“Once the script is ready we will go out to market, with the idea of attaching notable Australian cast, possibly involving our U.S. partnerships. With those attachments in place we will pitch to networks to move it into the production phase,” Tristan concluded.
september 30 , 2020/ by J. FUnk (Editor)
EDITION 1
A collaboration with Continuance Pictures
Today, Continuance Pictures and I are delighted to announce The Occasion, a title under the Continuance banner to present podcast interviews with emerging filmmakers, film reviews, film maker profiles, to be presented and written by me.
Continuance founders Tristan Barr and David Gim bring emerging Australian talent to the forefront of modern media distribution and consumption by making film and television content for multiple platforms and with international partners.
These two young guns have bold instincts and a global business outlook in what is a very fluid time for the entertainment industry. I am thrilled to be included in their vision as they expand their presence into the digital media space.