| A Playwright with a healthy sense of humour, Tim Bain is hitting his strides with stage musicals. By Gretel Hunnerup
Tim Bain's first play was called Tim. He couldn't find anyone to be in it, so the family dog became his reluctant co-star.
"I was four years old and I did all the marketing by sticking posters around the house." he says. "I also used to borrow a video camera to make cheap slasher films with my neighbours, using the vacuum cleaner as a weapon."
The writing was on the wall from the start for Bain. The country kid with a penchant for creating plays and films for kids now makes a living out of it as a 27 year old in North Fitzroy.
The VCA animation graduate sprung out of the blocks quickly to write and direct Arctic Adventure, an animated short about rebellious penguins, starring the voices of Sigrid Thornton and Eric Bana.
But most recently, Bain has been developing stage musicals to be performed by school students.
He sends them to online publisher Maverick Musicals, where schools can select the script and choose from a range of accompanying animations, as well as music by collaborator Michael Patterson.
"It's like a salad bar," he explains. "Every school is different, so some may, for example, want to use their own orchestra while others might just want the synthesised CD."
One of Bain's works has been picked up by an international school in Tokyo.
His newest, entitled Lucky, will be performed for the first time at Geelong Grammar later this month.
"Lucky is a film school graduate who meets a sleazy producer called Dingo Jones." says Bain. "He steals her script about Australia's history and hawks it to a Hollywood media mogul, who changes it in favour of a box office bonanza.
Ned Kelly becomes a shoot-em-up action hero, the Eureka Stockade goes kung fu and the First Fleet heads to Bombay instead of Botany Bay and it all goes Bollywood-mad.
"Yeah, I'm still just a big kid," says Bain. "I share the same sense of humour with kids and that's why I love doing what I do." |
)
