Our panel of industry experts have waded through the hundreds of entries submitted for OPTUS ONE80PROJECT and finally whittled down a Top 10! Now it’s your turn to judge, and just by doing so, you could win 1 of 5 BlackBerry Prize Packs valued at $1500 that includes a BlackBerry Smartphone, Lenovo IdeaPad notebook and Lexmark Prestige Printer.
All you have to do is check out the entries below, register at one80project.com.au, vote for your favourite and don’t forget to join our Facebook page; we’ll be featuring a top ten finalist every day! Just answer our question in the comments section to win an Event Cinema movie pass.
Optus 3G customers can vote via their mobile to receive an Event Cinemas discounted $7.50 movie ticket. SMS “ONE80” to 966 (“iONE80” for iPhone customers).
Don’t forget on April 18, 2010 MTV and Optus will be staging a free festival in Sydney to screen the Top 10 entries and announce the winner! Hosted by MTV’s own Erin McNaught, some of our judges will also be present to announce the winners of the Viewers Choice and Grand Prize. So bring a blanket and your posse from 6pm and see Hyde Park transformed in to a New York Cinema. Complete with complimentary popcorn, Doughboys will sell pizzas and a great beverage selection from our friends at The Winery!
Get to one80project.com.au for more details…
Written and Directed by David Rusanow and Asuka Sylvie
James Stott is a man who has seen better days. Down on his luck and seeking a change, James decides to rent out a cheap apartment at the recently converted Mercy Private Hospital under the impression that he is alone. Mercy Private is the perfect hiding place for a man with a dark past...or so James thinks.
David and Asuka: “A lot of the tension came from the location. It was actually a real abandoned hospital so when we were getting shots, it would actually look scary without much work! It was easy to come up with that tension. If we were making something look like a hospital it would’ve been harder. Let the audience use their imagination and stretch it out”
“I think there’s a good hole in the market for something like this to step in. It’s being done in the states with shows like True Blood, but there’s nothing like that being done here yet.”
Written by Nick Coombe and Directed by Veeran Naran
Jateen is a rebellious 15 year old Indian boy living in a western city who finds himself ensnared in a web spun from three different cultures. The first is the Australian culture he so much wants to be a part of, the second is his dad’s which he wants to leave, and the third is an ancient culture which has control of his blood…
Veeran: “My mum's from Zimbabwe and my dad’s from India, but I was born in NZ. Everything that’s in the story is what I’ve dealt with as a small kid growing up in a western society. MTV had a platform to showcase something that is touching on peoples mind, and here’s an opportunity to build a bridge between Australians and Indians and demonstrate to everyone Australia’s a beautiful place and we can all live here and get along!”
“I just love doing it. This is about any culture that lives in a western society, not just Indians. I’m just using it because I know it! It’s a competition and know you have to be in the race, but I’m not going to stop telling my story if I don’t win. If I don’t win, then I’ll just another sponsor and get it made!”
Directed by Mark Alston and Cameron Craig
It's 1983, and in a backstreet of a small Sydney Suburb, a great sporting moment is about to unfold - in one week, the Men's A grade Squash Champion of the Rockdale Sports Centre will be determined.
The week leading up to the final is full of great achievements and hurdles. But what it all comes down to is two men, two racquets, one ball and a polished wooden court.
Cameron and Mark: “We’re big fans of the mock-umentary style. So that’s what we were trying to recreate; we decided to do the game of squash because we thought people who looked like that deserved to be laughed at! It was very big in our parents era; obviously people play it out there somewhere but we don’t know who they are… but now it’s in the back streets of Rockdale!”
“We’ve been sitting on this for a while. It’s like our pet project that’s always been in the background. The original, which was shot seven years ago as a series, but we always knew we wanted to extend it into something - weather it’s an hour of tv, or a feature, or a series. The OPTUS ONE80 Project was a great opportunity to try and pitch it in!”
Sydney’s population has been split in half, forcing everyone to live according to a strict day or night schedule. Enter the Shift Order: Day and Night people are no longer allowed contact. Breaching the Shift Order means banishment and certain death - but two young people are willing to risk it all to find love...
Clara: “The idea originated from a job doing graphic design for Yellow Pages ads. When it’s close to deadline, they hire more contractors so they do day and night shift on the same computers. That concept has stuck with me. I thought, I bet in the future there will be so many people that everyone would have to be split up into day and night. Why wouldn’t it work? When you are at your job, your home is empty…”
“There’s a preconception that Australian films are depressing and dramatic and yet people keep making them. I think people are kind of getting bored of that, so even having something different is appeal enough.”
The students at Buxton Academy find friendships challenged and social class barriers clashing as secrets, lies, and deceptions are uncovered each day– high school will never be the same…
Emma: “I had a look on what is on TV for Aussie teenagers, and it’s not really indicative of anything. It’s from a non-descript place with non-descript people, no one looks like any one you know, and they don’t really do anything particularly interesting! I wanted to create something where Australian teenagers could see something on screen and go, oh yeah I identify with that. A show that pushes the boundaries.”
“Casting was a long worn-out process, I think I’ve seen every actor in Sydney! I really wanted a cross-section of interesting looks and sounds. I didn’t want everyone to look the same – Sydney is a multi-cultural city and I don’t think that’s well demonstrated on television. At the end of the day I just want to share Revolution with people, I couldn’t care less if it’s on a mobile phone or a cinema or on telly, I just want it out there..”
Written, Produced, Directed and Edited by Jarryd Clifford.
Chris was an up and coming musician, packed with talent. However after suffering a meteoric fall from stardom, he now lives on the streets. Like all disgraced musicians, he busks to stay alive.
But life is about to get interesting when Chris finds himself thrust into a share house with three insane housemates…
Jarryd: “I’m in a small comedy group called Wizard Sandwiches, and we’d been doing a lot of sketch comedy but we decided we wanted to have a go at film. We were in the process of making it, when we heard about the competition, and I thought it was a brilliant opportunity to get something made!”
“We did a show at the Melbourne comedy festival, and we weren’t afraid to go off the script. We had a comment that a lot of that stuff was funnier than what we wrote, so we had the idea, what if we come up with a story line for a show, but don’t write any script and just see what happens? It’s all improvised and off the cuff!”
Written, Directed, Edited by Jono Blake, Liam Coffey and Nick Erickson
Martin Hickey is Dead. But his three idiot friends aren’t and they’re going to try and live his life as he intended!
Liam: “I don’t think we want to align ourselves too closely with those guys though, there not the nicest human beings! I think there are elements of each of us in each of them. Sue is the overly aggressive guy and we all know someone a little bit like that who is always looking for a fight. Then there’s Tofa that’s just been dumped by his girlfriend and let his life be ruined by it, and there’s Cam who’s closest to me, he’s always taking any excuse not to go out there and grab life by the balls.”
“I hope that we don’t actually fit that well into any genre, because we tried to straddle a few, but I think we’d call ourselves a drama-dy. I think we’re a niche in terms of we’re a bit different to everyone else.”
Directed by Maia Horniak Written by Will Howarth & Andrew Ryan
Nick and Laurent Seller are two brothers who offer a very unique service. They can restart your life… But when a relation of a past client starts to destroy their business, the brothers begin to doubt everything they stand for.
Maia: “I was approached by two writers, Andrew Ryan and Will Harris; they gave me a call before the deadline, pitched me the idea, sent me through the script and I really wanted to direct it. We worked very closely on the trailers and script as a team, and explored what would it would take for someone to want to restart their life which was the core idea. It’s a really strong concept and that’s what I love about it.”
“I’m very interested in how to cross-platform, that was one of the things I thought of when I saw the script. TV is one of the strongest, but I think online and on phones you have the ability to get to know the characters that want to change their lives before they come to The Sellers. There’s quite a bit of content you could create around The Sellers themselves, to find out a bit more about what they do and the secrecy that surrounds it…”
Produced and Directed by Aaron Moss and David Vincent Smith.
Southern Cross puts the alarming increase of race related crime and nationalistic fervour under the microscope.
Aaron and David: “We were inspired by the events of the last couple of years, and we thought this would be a really good medium to explore that. There’s a huge rise in people getting the Southern Cross tattoo and we thought that was interesting. So we looked a little deeper into it, we found that they were getting it for different reasons – not because they were proud to be Australian but because they were using it as a chance to say ‘we’re Australian and your not.’”
“This isn’t ‘anti’ Southern Cross, it’s about how certain groups of people are taking it to mean something else. We didn’t want to demonize people that got the tattoo because they were proud to be Australian, that’s not what we’re looking at, it’s more about people making the symbol mean something negative.”
Produced and Directed by Troy Nankervis
Nathan's in a jam. He's got no house, no money, and no job. That is, until he stumbles across the 'Stone Pony' And once he's inside, there's no going back...
“Around the time I came up with the concept I was uni, living at home and trying to find money, and that’s what I was trying to tap into with this idea. The whole premise of the pilot is that a musician comes to Melbourne and gets a job in the bar. He thinks he’s in the right place, but really it’s the worse place ‘cause all he’s doing is working and not doing anything with music. I can identify with that, and I think a lot of other people could too.”
“A big question for me was do I make it a generic city or do I make it Melbourne? I think at the moment it’s the right time to talk about live music, and I think the show gives a platform to promote artists in that sense too. All the characters running round the bar in the show getting up to crazy stuff, but there’s also space to bring in local musicians and artists.”
Remember, you can vote once a day until 23.59pm AEST on Monday 5th April 2010 and every registered vote gives you another chance to win.
Copyright : MTV Australia
