Melbourne: “Thanassis”

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Considering the other group member’s characters, I decided to go for someone who was less relatable to me. I took inspiration from various people in my life, hopefully crafting an interesting character who is out of the norm of a young, white and educated Australian.

manolis_the_slap_episode_6“Thanassis (67) is a widower and father of three. His wife passed away from cancer four years ago, bringing him to a new understanding of loneliness. He comes to a realisation that he spent his youth working, and as a strict father, he feels that he had pushed away his children in the process. In an attempt to find purpose in his new life, he tries to get closer to his three kids, despite all of them having their own families and living away from home. He discovers a second chance for redemption by bonding with his middle child’s daughter, Sophia (5), nurturing her like his own.”

Undoubtedly, my character was influenced by Manolis from Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap. (What can I do, I just love Tsiolkas’ work). It would’ve been relatively easy for me to write about someone who was of Filipino heritage, considering my background, but I thought that Greek families were more dispersed and assimilated into Melbourne communities.

Without revealing too much of my personal circumstances, this character, his motivations and particularly his family were inspired by people close to me. This will make my writing easier and hopefully give me the opportunity to grab raw content to transform into story material.

Birth of PB & J Productions

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This week I had the chance to meet with my Writing for Filming, Filming for Writing team, which consisted of two other media students and three creative writing students. Upon pitching our ideas for things we’re interested in doing for the course, Paul, one of the CW students, proposed the fantastic concept of creating an anthology series based on Melbourne, with each of the characters we created covering different elements of the main character; the city itself. Paul proposed that each of our characters (whoever they are and however they imagined them to be initially) would be connected by a mysterious, neutral person whom the audience may not even come across, but has somehow played a part in our characters’ lives. Someone even mentioned the idea of this neutral character’s funeral being the event which brings together our six characters.

This was the perfect idea for a collaborative project. By doing it this way, we are not only engaged in our own personal projects so to speak, but we are given free reign on how our character’s story arc would play out in their own episode. For those who struggle to comprehend how the group has planned out the anthology series, think somewhere along the lines of The Slap (my personal favourite) or Skins, where every episode has a focus on a particular character’s story and their relation to the overarching element of the “mysterious, neutral character”. On top of this, the city itself plays a part on the characters’ plight, just as Litchfield does for Orange is the New Black and city of love for Paris Je t’aime.

Prior to the meeting with Stayci, the group must then share a character they would want to write an episode for on the Facebook group. From there, we will come up with the linking character and see what Stayci has to say for the series conception.

IntJobs Week #4

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This week starts off grind time for Team International Jobs, with all group members allocated to responsibilities for the Week 11 seminar. Week Eleven may sound far off, but rest assured that this doesn’t mean there will be dilly dallying!

For myself, I am tasked with creating a survey for students, on their aspirations of working in media overseas. The survey will assist us in shaping the content of the seminar, to provide our future speakers with a direction in their talk. A majority of our team brief was spent over planning the video promo, spearheaded by Angus Ward as director.

For the next week, the priority is to continue looking for potential speakers and to get our deadlines accomplished. It’s important more than ever to keep the communication open and to be present in weekly meet ups.