Tag: film

Thanassis’ Story

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UPDATE on Thanassis‘ story:

Thanassis (67) is a widower and father to Lisa (43), who lives in the States with her family, as well as Bernadeth (38) and Manuel (33) who are both based in Melbourne. His wife Koula, passed away from breast cancer 4 years ago and he has not been able to cope with the loneliness since then. For the past 4 years, he has been living with his oldest daughter in San Francisco.

Now, he returns to Melbourne to recompense for what he feels was a lack of fatherly affection to the rest of his children. He moves in with Bernadeth, her husband and their children Emma (15) and Sophia (5), whom he babysits now that he is retired. He quickly finds himself endearing to the child’s way of thinking.

On one Sunday, he discovers his son’s address and decides to go to his city apartment for a surprise visit. The surprise is reversed on him when the door is opened by another man, a stranger. As it turns out, this man is Manuel’s partner, Josh, whom Manuel has been building up the courage to introduce to his father. With a strict upbringing in a conservative household, Thanassis is outraged and storms out of the building, shunning his only son and the remaining bearer of the Manosopoulos family name. He refuses to accept his son’s homosexuality and finds himself pushing his children away even more. As it turns out, the whole family had known Manuel’s secret but had kept it from Thanassis, for fear of his reaction.

The rest of the story sees Thanassis trying to adapt to the modern way of thinking and assimilating (at least attempting) to his children’s new lives. He is no longer the father he needed to be in the past, when they were still kids. He must learn to change himself if he is to be a part of their family.

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.