CONRAD COMING TO AUCKLAND

"Conrad's art is never secular; it always conveys a deep tone of mystical or spiritual importance -- of the fundamental, factual, logical nature of such experience. And while this kind of perception is often attributed to 'primitive' non-Western cultures and to polytheistic or animistic religions, and while the modelling of Conrad's figures obviously owes something to Modernist primitivism, Conrad's links are really old European ones. Her art reaches back to a medieval, or Gothic, iconography. In a sense, it returns the recent legacy of Modernist primitivism to a remote European history. It enters that visual language in a medieval drama in which no aspect of life, however domestic, was merely secular -- in which objects of domestic life were imbued with malevolent or benign powers, in which banal characters could be seen as satanic or saintly, in which sexual and religious forces ran back together toward some suppressed, pagan source."

Ian Wedde

Director MOMA, Wellington, New Zealand,
from Christina Conrad - Visionary Logic

WE WANT YOU!

JOIN THE PRODUCTION TEAM AT SIFA

ADVANCED DIPLOMA is SCREEN & MEDIA at SIFA 

SYDNEY INSTITUTE FILM ACADEMY

WE MAKE FEATURES & FEATURE DOCUMENTARIES

TELEVISION DRAMA & COMEDY SERIES 

MUSIC VIDEO CLIPS

TRAILERS

REALITY TV PROGRAMS 

LIVE-TO-AIR CURRENT AFFAIRS & ISSUE BASED ARTS PROGRAMS. 

NO SHORTS! NO LECTURES! NO “FORMAL” TEACHING! NO SITTING IN CLASSROOMS, PASSIVELY RECEIVING 2nd HAND INFORMATION YOU CAN’T IMMEDIATELY APPLY. 

JOIN THE REVOLUTION! 

Send expressions of interest to 

stonekingseminars@hotmail.com 

or to 

Anthony.McGann@tafensw.edu.au

FOR MORE DETAILS CLICK HERE

NEXT INTAKE IN JULY - STILL TIME!!!

JOIN THE PRODUCTION TEAM AT SIFA

ADVANCED DIPLOMA 

in SCREEN & MEDIA at SIFA 

SYDNEY INSTITUTE FILM ACADEMY

WE MAKE FEATURES & FEATURE DOCUMENTARIES

TELEVISION DRAMA & COMEDY SERIES 

MUSIC VIDEO CLIPS

TRAILERS

REALITY TV PROGRAMS 

LIVE-TO-AIR CURRENT AFFAIRS & ISSUE BASED ARTS PROGRAMS. 

NO SHORTS! NO LECTURES! NO “FORMAL” TEACHING! NO SITTING IN CLASSROOMS, PASSIVELY RECEIVING 2nd HAND INFORMATION YOU CAN’T IMMEDIATELY APPLY. 

JOIN THE REVOLUTION! 

Send expressions of interest to 

stonekingseminars@hotmail.com 

or to 

Anthony.McGann@tafensw.edu.au

FOR MORE DETAILS CLICK HERE

NEXT INTAKE IN JULY - STILL TIME!!!

STUDENT SCREENWRITERS WANTED FOR FEATURE FILM

Looking for a team of 8 to 10 screenwriters that would like to collaborate to write an out-of-the-box genre feature (zombie film) to be produced in 2017 by SIFA (Sydney Institute Film Academy. Project mentors are Bernie Zelvis and Billy Marshall Stoneking. Film will be shot on location in and around Galong NSW (west of Canberra) over a fortnight. Writers of the screenplay are eligible to apply for positions on the film (director, producer, design, sound, editing, etc) Feature to be shot multi-cam on IPhone6+ Script to be completed by end of 2016. If you'd like to join the writer's table and be involved in this project, we welcome expressions of interest to stonekingseminars@hotmail.com - This is one of the production projects on offer through the SYDNEY SCREENWRITERS' STUDIO. Please apply! 

MORE DETAILS AT WHERE'S THE DRAMA?

TEST DRIVE SYDNEY SCREENWRITERS' STUDIO FOR FREE

TEST DRIVE the Sydney Screenwriters' Studio FOR FREE!

As a special introductory offer, S.I.F.A. (Sydney Institute Film Academy, Randwick TAFE) is offering prospective candidates to the year-long Screenwriters' Script Development Studio a chance to "test-drive" the program by attending a ten-week workshop conducted by writer / producer Billy Marshall Stoneking (Gayby Baby), AT NO COST!

At the conclusion of the ten-weeks, participants - at their discretion - will be elegible to enrol for a further 12 months at a nominal cost, which also includes participation in productions as well as workshops in directing, producing, editing, and design.

The 10-week session is limited to 20 participants. First come / first served. Interested parties are invited to send their names and contact details to Anthony at

Anthony.McGann@tafensw.edu.au

or call / msg Billy Marshall Stoneking for more details on 0437 864 487

FREE WORKSHOP COMMENCES   Monday, 5th September at 10 am, and meets every Monday for ten weeks.

Location: Randwick TAFE, Level 1, Rm 122, Randwick NSW AUSTRALIA - HURRY!

CHECK OUT THE PRODUCTION STREAM - S.I.F.A. offers students on-the-job learning with opportunities to work on feature dramas, feature documentaries and TV drama and comedy series, including Reality TV shows.   

DETAILS at http://www.wheresthedrama.com/workshops.htm

LIVING THROUGH YOUR CHARACTERS

You have to live in and through the characters of a screenplay. You have to feel the experience of their struggles and wounds. When the writing goes well, you You wake up thinking their thoughts, planning strategies for confronting their problems.  Their burdens are your burdens. Their distress affects you as if it were your own.  The difference is you must avoid dictating what they should. They must have the freedom to dictate what will write.  You don’t get to determine their needs and capabilities, and you sure as hell don’t get to decide the validity of their boundaries. You must leave your personal prejudices behind. You must leave your ego at the door. You are not the expert on their life; they are. Listen to what they are telling you. Keep open to what they are showing you.  Your abilities and opinions are are necessarily relevant to what they desire or require. Don’t make your own anxieties a reason for imprisoning them. Free Drama! Liberate the characters!

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

Writing a terrific screenplay is harder than doing a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, okay? Only so many wannabe writers want to keep all the pieces inside the box with the lid securely shut. And they shake it and shake it, hoping the pieces will eventually come together and mean something great, but they never do.  

Others will actually open the box and stare at the pieces and try to assemble an approximate picture keeping everything inside the box. Alas, there is never enough there to make a complete picture.

To tell the truth, writing a screenplay is nothing like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It's more like emptying the box on a giant kitchen table and discovering that there are 5 or 6 or even more difference puzzles all mixed together and not knowing which pieces one can trust to make a complete picture. In the beginning you can never tell if a piece belongs to the puzzle you're working on or not. And if that isn't bad enough, you soon discover that there are parts of pictures on both sides of every piece and your partner or kid is wondering what's for dinner.

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

CHARACTERS ALL THE WAY DOWN

To really understand the character-driven screenplay, you have to understand the process by which they are conceived and written. And to understand the process you have to first acknowledge that the character-driven drama is found as it written, and written as it is found, and the finding necessarily involves more than the characters in the script. It involves an active and dramatic interaction between and among ALL of the characters necessary for finding the story. These include not only the story’s characters, but also the story’s audience (the conception of which is always an imaginative act, even for producers); the writer/storyteller character, who shares in, complicates, obstructs and aids the main character/s in dealing with the dramatic problem; and the writer’s tribe or tribes which form the contextual circumstances in which the writer has been initiated, including his/her geographic, family, societal, cultural and spiritual relationships as well as the economic, political and legal traditions he/she has been heir to.

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

SPECIAL OFFER! SYDNEY SCREENWRITERS' STUDIO

Try The Sydney Screenwriters' Studio -

TEN sessions over ten weeks, absolutely free !!


As a special introductory offer, S.I.F.A. is offering prospective candidates to the year-long Screenwriters' Workshop a chance to "test-drive" the program by attending a ten-week, workshop conducted by writer / producer Billy Marshall Stoneking, AT NO COST!

At conclusion of the ten-week workshop, participants - at their discretion - may elect to enrol for a further 12 months at a nominal cost, which also includes workshops in directing, producing, editing, and design.  Participation is limited to 20 participants. First come / first served. Interested parties are invited to send their names and contact details to Anthony at

 Anthony.McGann@tafensw.edu.au

or call Billy Marshall Stoneking for more details on 0437 864 487

FREE WORKSHOP COMMENCES Monday, 5th September at 10 am, and meets every Monday for ten weeks. HURRY!

More details at http://www.wheresthedrama.com/workshops.htm

ENTER THE DRAMA - NETWORK THE REVOLUTION

NETWORK THE REVOLUTION IN DRAMATIC, SCREEN STORYTELLING

THE TERROR OF SCREENWRITING

Don't look down, don't give up. You have to fight for the good stuff. It's a life-and-death kind of thing. You think you can make something intense and not hurt for it? The struggle is something most people have no stomach for. They get halfway there and say "she's right, that'll do" - but it's never right and it never does what you needed it to do. It's worth your soul (almost) to find the perfect imperfect character.

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

MAYA & THE REAL STUFF - COMING SOON!

CROWD-FUNDING FOR STONEKING'S NEWEST COLLECTION OF POETRY

STARTING SOON!   WATCH FOR DETAILS HERE

Artist CONRAD, Heretic, cocks, cunts vaginas and kidnapping

MORE LIKE THIS

MORE LIKE THIS HERE

GITGO TODAY 24th May edition : poetry, elections, NYPD, Okinawa & MORE!

GITGO.TODAY - May 17th broadcast, featuring Alternative electric Living, FBI briefing, Free recharge stations...

MORE LIKE THIS

A SITUATION OF IRONY

There is a situation of irony inherent in all human experience. If we assume, heuristically, that everything we have ever done as a species - all culture, all religion, all art, philosophy, politics, law and science - is an expression of, or response to, our primordial anxiety concerning our non-existence, that we live with an awareness that one day we will be erased from the world - then our concept of self and the actions that sustain, explain, ennoble and educate that self can be viewed as strategies aimed at shielding our “self” from this fear. In this way, culture may be seen as a shared delusion we have created to protect ourselves from this ever-present and all-consuming danger.

We take solace from our belief that others seem to have found a way of enduring, of projecting at least their thoughts and feelings past death through the music, books, paintings, social movements and reforms, they have created. We comfort ourselves with the notion that art is timeless, that religion is timeless, and we form entire systems based upon our obsessive and largely unconscious need to construct and maintain a wall between ourselves and the flood of nonbeing which waits, ready to burst through whatever edifices we have made to protect ourselves. 

 We have done this to ourselves, in our quest for to combat or nothingness, in our need for safety, power, "freedom". We have made addition after addition after addition to the construct we so blithely refer to as "reality", believing that this "self", this ego, this bundle of stories, is something in need of protection or conservation. 

 But what if it is the self in its very essence that is the creator and curator of death? What if the additions we make to combat the dread are themselves the dread for which we seek inoculation? The idea that one must feel sorry for the miseries of the world and the sadnesses one must endure in the face of such misery is so very nineteenth century, a time that many if not most of us go on blindly inhabiting, though the eviction notice was served at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lasting stench of "modern" continues to waft over the broken anthill bearing witness to a vast and perverse illusion, fabricated from strategies aimed at transcending pure being (anxiety) but which are nevertheless lost in the clutter we have made to free ourselves from the unknown.

- Billy Marshall Stoneking

GITGO TODAY - 10th May edition

Part 2 of Gayby Baby, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Damian show us a Japanese kids festival, Mt Fujiyama and how they handle things like Fukushima, and Marco is at central Court in NY.

WATCH HERETIC ONLINE NOW

WATCH IT NOW

password: placenta24

WATCH JELLY'S PLACENTA

Leith - an obsessive transvestite in her mid-30s - has been involved in a ten-year relationship with her lover, Jelly, and Jelly's dead mother whose spirit inhabits the fig tree in the garden beneath which Jelly's placenta is buried. 

Consumed by jealousy for the mother, and by a primordial urge to possess Jelly - a slippery and seemingly passive drama lecturer - Leith's world is cracked wide open by the arrival of Jelly's student - the exotic Chinese beauty, Hart Sommerstein. When Jelly arrives home, Leith accuses him of having an affair, and, in a shattering confrontation, they spill the horror of their relationship. In her frenzy to destroy the mother's dominance, Leith slays the tree with an axe, which unexpectedly frees Jelly. 

WATCH IT NOW

HORROR IN MAY at NOW SHOWING

CLICK HERE FOR HORROR

A STORY IS A WAY OF WORLDING YOURSELF

  

  A story is a language for presenting emotion, a way of seeing and hearing, a way of being, of worlding yourself. A story seeks to reconstruct the catastrophe that’s already happened so that next time it happens we will be better prepared for it, but it never happens, not in the way we imagine. A story is a liberation and a confinement disguised as an escape, if only we knew on which side of the bars we sat. A story is no remedy for forgetfulness, merely proof that it exists. It is dialectical - it heals with wounding. A story is not a journey so much as its anticipation, a path that opens hope to the possibility that love is worth striving for, but alas, who really knows if it leads anywhere at all, and it may not even be a path.

--- Billy Marshall Stoneking

ORGANIC SCREENPLAYS

A screenplay may be said to possess an organic form if its structure has originated from within the lives and relationships of the characters, where “the characters” refers not only to the dramatis personae, but also to the audience, the writer and the writer’s tribe or tribes. Such a screenplay stands in contrast to its more formulaic cousin, which is usually produced in accordance with imposed rules and techniques - HOW rather than WHAT & WHY. An organic screenplay is shaped from within the story. It cannot be created by a mere spectator. Organic creation is creation liberated from prejudice, from habit, from fear - it is actively courageous insofar as it allows the characters to enact their story, and thus gradually reveal what heretofore were its hidden significances.  In contrast, the more mechanical processes and rules which many screenwriting gurus recommend, takes refuge in plot outlining. Surprise is not about characters taking you by the metaphorical neck and rubbing your nose in your preconceptions, but about discovering clever ways of subverting plot conventions.

Organic form cannot be forced or predetermined. It arises out of play, in which all the characters necessary for finding the story are engaged with one another at the emotionally relevant levels of engagement to evoke empathy and identification. The organic screenplay cannot arise from the screenwriter in emotional isolation - indeed, the screenwriter may ultimately be simply the MEDIUM through which the story is written down.  

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

There are probably many reasons why so many would-be screenwriters aren’t doing the very difficult work demanded by any dramatic story, but it seems that one of their reasons is that they don’t want the messiness that dramatic problems bring into their lives. Problems, complications, contradictions & unexpected frustrations - these are the troubles they strive to avoid in their every-day lives, but essential elements in the lives of dramatic characters. It’s difficult embracing these even though they are central to the construction of a powerful and credible plot. More often than not, would-be screenwriters take refuge in reportage and writing art direction,  describing and explaining rather than showing and interacting with the characters within the emotional space in which the characters are acting. For some, the making of a beautiful sentence is much more accessible and desirable than the horrors one must face in constructing a memorable plot. However, if an audience is going to give a good goddamn about the story, you’re going to have to struggle, you’re going to have to bleed, and get off your ass and get your characters off their asses, and send them out into the story-world to fight for something. Something important, something the loss of which would shake their souls. And don’t leave out those characters and forces that are fighting against them, either. No one can be sheltered from this. Nothing is protected. 

- Billy Marshall Stoneking

REVISITING "THE TIME ART"

When it comes to screenwriting - or the writing of a story in the form of a screenplay - it is important to understand that one of the fundamental raw materials you are working with is TIME. Time, not so much in terms of how long the story is, but rather in terms of the way you manage its rhythms and pacing, its rests and climaxes. Time is of the essence - it is essential to the story's movement and, therefore, its meaning, just as is the case in our daily lives. Time is dramatized change, conveyed through shots and scenes. When reading a script or watching a film, we must have a sense of time passing and in that passing the sense of the emotional weight, the emotional urgency, by which the characters are moved in their individual and/or collective quests. Whether it's a tragedy or a comedy it's all about timing in which time is compressed, intensified, re-vivified in ways that keep us at the centre of the story's emotional energy.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

AUSTRALIAN SPRING

READ MORE ABOUT THE MAKING OF THIS UNIQUE MULTI-PLOT FEATURE HERE

POINT OF VIEW

Point of view in the context of a dramatic screenplay is a matter of perceptual and emotional emphasis. It is the emotional context in which the action finds its meaning. It involves choices, beliefs, opinions and the lived drama of a character grappling with the central problem of the story.

- Billy Marshall Stoneking

THE VERY DRAMATIC BUSINESS OF P I T C H I N G

From the perspective of many Australian screenwriters, pitching can be a rather dreaded and unnerving activity. The idea of fronting up to someone and telling them how great one's story is can seem at times downright unAustralian, or worse, decidedly American. The character of the snake-oil salesman doesn't sit well with a lot of Australian writers. The diffidence with which one navigates the cool hipness of the so-called film scene frequently conspires against the expression of genuine emotion or personal commitment. 

A script or story idea may have much to recommend it, but if the screenwriter, director or producer is unable for whatever reason to imaginatively and succinctly conduct the listener/investor/production company into the core emotional experience that the film offers, the script or project may never have its time in the sun.

The first and most important thing you need to understand is that you are NOT selling a script - or rather a collection of words ABOUT a script; you are selling a character - and that CHARACTER is YOURSELF.   

READ MORE HERE

I HEAR VOICES

Writing is more auditory than anyone who is not a writer thinks. It is all about hearing voices, and discriminating between voices. The voice is the embodiment of the emotions, especially when one is working with characters - it comes from the mouths of the characters and enters through the ears of the writer, like music. Any screenwriter worth a damn understands this, because this is how the writing happens, this is the basis of the writer’s relationship with the characters - VOICES.

In a world that prizes silence as much as this one does, in a world that doesn’t fully comprehend the presence and involvement of disembodied voices in the creative process, such a notion is pure madness. However, if the writer is to break through s/he must eschew the likely ridicule of closed minds and fearful attitudes, and claim all the voices that inhabit the story that is trying to get itself born.

- Billy Marshall Stoneking

WHERE'S THE DRAMA?

Follow Billy Stoneking's board BEST OF "WHERE'S THE DRAMA?" on Pinterest.

Wouldn't you REALLY like to know?

CAVE TOUR MEMBERS - CLICK ON PICTURE

CAVE TOUR HERE

STONEKING, SCREENWRITING & PINTEREST

Follow Billy Stoneking's board SCREENWRITING on Pinterest.

10 OF THE BEST - Selected by Maya Newell

Filmmaker Maya Newell has certainly had a busy year, with the release of her debut feature documentary, Gayby Baby, garnering international headlines for its unique look at Australian kids being raised by same-sex parents. 

The film observes the daily life of "gaybies" (like herself) growing up in Australia. We see the specific challenges they face at school and on the street, along with the everyday moments that are typical of families the world over. You can watch Gayby Baby on at SBS On Demand now.   

We invited Maya Newell to dive into the catalogue of movies and documentaries at SBS On Demand, and recommend her Top Ten. (Click on the yellow SBS On Demand logo to access the video.)   READ MORE

A SCREENPLAY MUST SPEAK... TO YOU, & TO HIM & TO HER, & TO US & TO THEM...

For your screenplay to be any good you have to find a way of turning it into a life and death experience. It must become a necessity for life itself, like food, like shelter, like movement. For your screenplay to have any chance of being born and going out into the world and changing people, it must first of all challenge you, the writer, at your core. It must do so with all the power of its voice and voices. It must speak to you. And what it says must surprise, threaten, inspire and humble you all at the same time. For a screenplay to tell the story that is the reason for its existence in the first place, it must possess a worthiness that encourages those who come in contact with it to surrender to its emotional body. It must create a dance, a tango, that draws from an ancient, eternal music, a rhythm and closeness that is undeniable.

- Billy Marshall Stoneking

READ MORE

AVANT GARDE & VISIONARY CINEMA

WATCH FILMS HERE

THE ART OF SLOW

Listen, when we are born, we are born a Buddha, a genius. Every one of us. In the belly of the mother, the family start to change you. The family. The family gives all the psychological limits they have to you. Then you go to school, society will limit you. Then you are in a country, culture will limit you. Family, social, culture. And there is historical limits. But they are limits. You are living in limits. In reality we are infinite, we don’t have limits. And ALL the fight of life, the opening of consciousness, is to open the limits of your family, of your society and your history cultural. In order to realize yourself what you are, who you are, you need to decide to be what you are and not what the others want you to be. They want you to be something. And you want to be yourself. But you may not be what the other want you to be.

— Alejandro Jodorowsky

SYDNEYSIDERS!!! DON'T MISS THIS

BOOK ONLINE HERE

EVIDENCE

(for Maya)


We must force ourselves
to say the things 
we cannot speak, 
the wounds for which 
there are no voices, 
pain that is
our silent scream.
We have to find a way
to set them free,
the stuff we pretend
cannot be seen
or heard, for fear that
speaking might bring
fresh monsters.
And so we create
stories,
songs,
characters
& poems,
the stuff that's in us,
the stuff that is us.
The stuff that points.

"Anyone can learn to compose a poem or write a story, but the essence and power of any transformative act is the courage required to make the necessary crossings out and crossings over."

BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

COMING TO SYDNEY 28th FEBRUARY

ATTENTION!!! SYDNEY WRITERS, DIRECTORS, PRODUCERS, ACTORS!!!

MORE DETAILS HERE 

http://www.wheresthedrama.com/workshops.htm

HERETIC - Watch It Here!

http://veracity24.tumblr.com/post/130911702473

http://veracity24.tumblr.com/post/73999831619

A THOUGHT

Writing - like any creative process - involves a series of 'deaths'. You have to let go of some things - a sentence, a prejudice, an attitude or expectation. By jettisoning every preoccupation with what could've or should've been expressed, you give yourself a chance to create the conditions that will allow you to cultivate the confidence necessary for showing or expressing what it is that wants to speak or act through you. Without dividing yourself between the demands of others, and your own need to be successful, you open yourself to the possibility of forgiving yourself for your any perceived limitations, and by virtue of that forgiveness, to rise above them.

- Billy Marshall Stoneking

READ MORE

BUY THE FEATURE DOCUMENTARY THE WHOLE WORLD'S TALKING ABOUT

ORDER HERE

CLICHES

Most screenplays, at least in the early drafts, are built on cliches. The cliche is the broadest possible stroke of emotion, the familiar approximation that indicates some semblance of meaning. But it is stale, hackneyed and ultimately impotent. What the screenwriter must do is recognize the cliches and then have the guts and talent to transform them, which means disfiguring with it, damaging them, roughing them up, not for the sake of making a better cliche, but to prove to oneself that they have no power over you, and that you will not be a slave to them or allow their covert bullying. A damaged cliche can be very seductive, of course. It may even seem a useful option if you're writing bad melodrama or satire, but really, what you must strive for, and ultimately achieve, is your liberation from cliches altogether.

IMPROVIZATION

One should treat the writing of a screenplay - whether a drama or a sitcom - in the way jazz musicians improvise with music. Writing actions and voices is much more like creating music that shooting photographs. Like the jazz musician, the writer is steeped in tribal circumstances - ideas, themes, talents, tastes and history, and, like the jazz player, contributes to a conversation. The musician converses with other musicians, the writer - at least at the scripting stage - converses with the other characters, the characters in the script and the audience, and the cultural and societal contexts out of which his/her passion for the story has been born. Neither the screenwriter nor the jazz musician knows exactly where the story/music is going - it is all about listening and improvising around whatever it is that you are hearing. It's a conversation, and it's always moving, always changing, so long as the music and drama are there.

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

RE-WRITING THE WRITER

IT'S THE CHARACTERS, STUPID!

JOIN SCRIPT EDITING GROUP AT FACEBOOK