Film Victoria has supported Mini Studios to attend the Arista Genre workshops in March 2009. Mini studios thanks the Film Vic team for the support of this project.

Producer Steve Kearney will be taking a slate of films to Cannes Film Festival 2009 supported by Screen Australia.

The Pauline Hanson bio pick has received 4th draft funding from Screen Australia. This draft will be joined by award winning director Anna Broinowski ( Forbidden Lie$) to steer the doc towards a shooting script and again Stephen Sewell will scribe. Duncan Thompson, head of The Australian Film School will script edit.

Mini Studios and head Pictures have delivered the Stephen Baker directed animated short for Mitsubishi as part of an on going opportunity given by Tropfest to it’s past winners.

see it here - http://tropfest.ninemsn.com.au/supershortseries/

Screen Australia has supported the 4th draft of Please Explain to be written by Stephen Sewell as award winning Director Anna Broinowski joins the team to steer the story to production in late 09. Anna Broinowski is best known for her AFI award winning debut feature “Forbidden Lies” - the most successful Australian documentary feature from Australia in 08. The project has been steered through Screen Australia by outgoing project officer Megan Simpson Huberman. The project has letters of interest from a variety of Distribution companies in Australia and International Sales Agents. Broinowski and Sewell will work closely together on the next draft. Mini Studios would like to thank all those involved at Screen Australia in supporting the project.

See more on Forbidden Lies here - http://www.forbiddenlies.com.au/

HOLLYWOOD CHOOSES AUSTRALIAN TEAM

HEAD PICTURES and MINI STUDIOS have announced their involvement in an untitled feature produced by Peter Farrelly and Charles Wessler consisting of two dozen short comedy films in the vein of “The Groove Tube” and “Kentucky Fried Movie.”

Head Pictures directors Steve Baker and Damon Escott & will co-direct and Mini Studios producers Steve Kearney and Leanne Tonkes will produce their short, entitled The Apprentice. Other directors already in talks include Brett Ratner, Todd Phillips, Mike Judge, Josh Gordon and Will Speck. Farrelly also will direct two of the shorts.

“Peter and I are very excited about The Apprentice, our only Australian contribution to the project. Steve’s script is both disturbing and hysterically funny. It is unique and will stand out from all the other short films in the movie. Steve and Damon are terrific filmmakers. We have an amazing team assembled for our movie and these guys fit right in”, Wessler said.

Steve Baker, a multi- award winning director and animator (Winner Tropfest 2007 An Imaginary Life) is currently nominated for an AFI Award for Dog With Electric Collar. Dog opened Sydney and Brisbane film festivals and has just screened at Hiroshima Animation Festival. Damon Escott is a successful director with award winning music videos (Aria winner 2006) for some of Australia’s finest music artists, including Silverchair, Powderfinger, Bernard Fanning, John Butler Trio, Sarah Blasko, End of Fashion and the Grates. He also directs TVC’s for brands including Coke, Nestle, Arnotts etc. The two have collaborated on a number of projects under the HEAD PICTURES banner.

Screen Australia has also come on board with support for The Apprentice, which could end up being one of the final shorts to receive funding.

Overture will handle US distribution, while GreeneStreet Films Intl. is set to sell the film internationally.

Screen Australia has just approved funding for the Steve Baker (winner and Tropfest 2007) scripted short film “The Apprentice”. The short will be co directed by Baker and Damon Escott.

form an Article in Screen Daily by Sandy George in Sydney.

Former Participant Productions exec Chris Adams is working with Oz filmmaker Steve Kearney to produce films that can attract US studio financing.

“Steve is the creative genius and I’m the deal maker,” said Adams, who is American. Asked whether the move was motivated by the 40 per cent offset that is now available to producers of Australian films, he said: “I’m interested in making movies that will be financed at a studio level because they are so good they will be made regardless.”

The pair first met in the early 1990s when Kearney, half of the one-time Australian comedy duo Los Trios Ringbarkus, had development deals with various studios and was living in the US; this new venture represents a revitalisation of their friendship. Adams is expected to announce deals on several projects when he addresses delegates at the annual conference of the Screen Producers Association of Australia (SPAA), which is being held in about six weeks in Queensland.

The pair are operating under Adams’s Orbit Media Group in the US and Kearney and partner Leanne Tonkes’s Mini Studios, which has a range of projects in development including teen revenge, zombie and other genre films, and several biopics, including one about the controversial politician Pauline Hanson, which is being written by Stephen Sewell.

“My guidance to Steve (Kearney) is that I don’t care if it is a movie about Australia, for Australians, or by Australians,” said Adams, “but it has got to be a movie that stands in its own right, a movie that anybody would see, and that’s what he has been delivering me.”

Adams is involved in a range of companies, many in new media. The common factor, he says, is that they all attempt to expand the reach of great storytelling whether it is 90 seconds in length or 90 minutes. It is his worldwide business interests that are the core reason for the move to Australia in late 2009: he travels for up to half the year and his Australian wife, Sharon Adams, and young son will now be among family and friends when he is absent.

Adams was senior vice president of business development and chief vision officer from day one at Participant, the film investor with the social conscience, and left in February 2006, soon after the company’s films, including An Inconvenient Truth, won four Academy Awards.

“It is one of those decisions that no-one no-one understands but I understand it perfectly: the decision was because I had fulfilled my job,” he said. “I’m a guy who starts with the blank piece of paper, that loves the unknown and loves to create companies.”

Many of the sessions at the three-day SPAA Conference relate to Australia’s new feature film landscape: emerging business models will be analysed, lenders will discuss what they require before agreeing to cashflow the offset, speakers will delve into how to create scripts of broader appeal and, in a session chaired by former Film Finance Corporation chief executive Brian Rosen, several producers will discuss why and how they are setting up permanent alliances with overseas players.

Producer Steve Kearney will attend the event with support from Multi Media Victoria. The CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment 2008, the largest wireless data event in the industry, truly embodies the ever-changing, dynamic and innovative world of wireless data in Enterprise and in Entertainment.

This is the one show that brings key audiences such as enterprise users, solution providers, content owners and mobile distribution channels together to form strategic partnerships, service industry needs and create new innovations in wireless data.

Steve will be bringing the innovative mobile based Text2text project seeking partnerships.

Producer Steve Kearney and Mini Studios project Please Explain have been invited to the powerful IFF sept 7 and 8th. This opportunity will push the project into the first stage of financing and we are thrilled to begin moving Please Explain into production.

This year’s list of confirmed (so far) include representatives from:
Endeavor (USA), Participant (USA), Trust/Nordisk (Denmark), Insomnia Media (USA), Bavaria International (Germany), Fortissimo (The Netherlands/Hong Kong), Cinetic (USA), Big Beach Films (USA), Film 4 (UK), Magnolia (USA), IFC (USA), Backup (France), Aramid Capital (UK), Kinowelt (Germany), Paramount Vantage (USA), Overture (USA), etc.

Steve will also have an opportunity to meet 59 producers & exec producers from Canada, the US, Germany, the UK, Wales, Ireland, NZ, South Africa, etc. Attendance at the International Sales Agent Panel, the Networking Luncheon, and meetings with Sundance programmers.

http://www.omdc.on.ca/Page5114.aspx