The Story So Far: Beef farmer and other Hunter locals passionate to tell a heartwarming story...

The feature film Bathing Franky was born in the year 2002 in Newcastle, Australia. A farmer who had been an actor was performing a monologue about an optimistic man in a tough situation. The character was a bit of a performer himself, a bit of a backyard magician. His motto was "don't take it too seriously" - even though he'd spent the last 25 years caring full-time for his incapacitated mother.

Something about the character and performance touched an audience member, a corporate filmmaker and TV editor. The filmmaker, Owen Elliott, said to the farmer, Michael Winchester, ‘I'd like to make a movie out of that character.’

Elliott and Winchester began to meet and write in Newcastle (at the Bogey Hole Cafe & PAN) and in Coffs Harbour (where Elliott was working for NBN). Later the meetings were in Lindfield and on the Winchester farm at Mount Rivers. The story really began to take shape when the character Steve arrived. Someone so unlike Rodney, Steve was a young man defined by two events: the death of his best friend Pauly, which was partly his fault, and the affair he'd had in prison with Raven.

While the Rodney character was using his innate optimism to get through every day with his mother Signora Francesca, Steve was all anger, hopelessness, vengeance, confusion, an unguided creature in a doomed relationship with his old girlfriend Susie. So Bathing Franky became the tale of an odd couple of men helping each other negotiate their way out of the kind of inner prison they'd been living in.

The team had a reading at the PAN (Performance Arts Newcastle) Theatre. They acquired a script editor, a Dungog shire resident named John O'Brien, who was the creative force behind the ABC series Fireflies, and whose kids were going to the same school as Winchester's. They spent a weekend on O'Brien's farm in his wife's studio, taking a scalpel to the story while the Hunter Valley hills glowed in the distance. Winchester would have given up writing well before draft 828, except that friends and industry professionals kept encouraging him to stick with it.

The script made the top 50 in Project Greenlight (out of 800 entries). The team started thinking about actually making it. Themselves. Plenty of people do. They put together a YouTube channel to document the process of casting, location scouting, begging. They soon found Diarmid Heidenreich (The Cut, McLeod's Daughters) & Bree Desborough (Home & Away, Always Greener) to play Steve and Susie. They developed a Sponsorship Package and attracted some interest and support from Hunter companies.

They drove around Dungog, Newcastle and Maitland looking for the right locations. They did some market research and developed ‘profiles’ of Bathing Franky's ideal audience. They also had to eat and pay the mortgage. Winchester had a biodynamic beef farm to run. Elliott had his corporate filmmaking business to run. That's the world of no-budget filmmaking.

Then the momentum started to kick in. Elliott found a DOP in Gavin Banks, who'd lensed the docudrama Lockout. Through Theatresports they found young go-getter Lisa Ellicott, an environmental engineer with an obsession for film and theatre. They found Maitland Park - and by door-knocking the area they found Irene's house directly opposite. They decided to commit and set shooting dates in late August.

In February Henri Szeps read the script, recognised himself in Rodney, loved the work ... negotiations are continuing very well.

Sponsorship is coming in. Two generous locals have invested five grand each in Bathing Franky. As media interest grows - articles in the Newcastle Herald, Maitland Mercury, interviews on local radio - more public interest is happening. The ball keeps rolling. The crew are all deferring wages on the production - but Winchester and Elliott are hopeful of some production funding.

The team is meeting regularly. There's more to cast, there's insurance, more negotiation, scheduling, more sponsors to seek. It's happening, thanks to a little dream, a lot of encouragement and a vast amount of passion for film story-telling.