Jake Ludowyke

About The Tomasino Brothers

The story goes that Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves, and you might say the same about modern Romans, Tommy and Vinnie Tomasino. After their parents were killed, Tommy and Vinnie were taken in by the local Don and trained from infancy to be effective Family operatives. On the surface, things are going well for the boys, and for the family - but beneath the facade of a smooth operation, trouble is brewing. Gino, the Don's son, thinks that being a klutz shouldn't get in the way of his progression through Family ranks, there’s something a just a little off about the Don's right hand man, Vinnie has noticed just how grown up the Don's prodigal daughter is, and just what is the deal with the greenhorn cop who is determined to bring them down?

"The Tomasino Brothers" is a black comedy* web-series that lampoons the epic Mafia films of the 70s and 80s. Imagine the intricately intertwined characters of the Sopranos with a tongue-in-cheek genre-aware sense of humour. The first season is written and well into pre-production - but a couple of extra bux will make the difference between awesome and mind-blowing. We are hoping to raise between $4000 and $5000 to supplement what we've already put in.

* A black comedy is a comedy that doesn't really have a lot of ha-ha jokes in it, but people get killed

 

About the format

In the tradition of the Mob epics of the 70s and 80s, and genre-defining series The Sopranos, The Tomasino Brothers brings the long-form serial to the web. Each one of the ten episodes in the first season runs for anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes, culminating in what essentially is a full-length feature when all added together. While written to be viewed in bite-sized (or mouthful-sized) pieces, the show will hopefully stand up as a feature film as well.

 

About Wizard Sandwiches

We're a comedy troupe from Melbourne and we've been trying in vain to make people laugh for some several years now. After meeting on the cast of a university comedy revue, we branched off and put on their own show the following year, entitled 'Barry and his Mantastic Manship', which was a runaway success. Since then, we've had success with the 'Housemates: The 10% Musical', which was in the Top 10 entrants into the Optus 180 project, and their mocku-documentary coverage of the Humans vs Zombies event in Melbourne. We've done a couple of shows for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival but recently we've been doing more and more film projects (4 of the 5 of us did film majors at uni.) Our website (www.wizardsandwiches.com) has recently been revamped with animated GIFs and background  midi files, making it more irritating than ever before. Lots of our stuff is up there, but you can check out http://www.vimeo.com/groups/wizardsandwiches and http://www.youtube.com/user/WizardSandwiches as well.

About the project

During rehearsals for an early comedy show the Wizard Sandwiches were putting together, the larger than life characters of Tommy and Vinnie were born of Stuart Daulman's active imagination and love for the mob genre. Over the course of the next year or two, he worked with fellow Sandwich Jake Ludowyke to write the series that has since become The Tomasino Brothers. With support from boutique equipment rental house Inspiration Studios, a proof of concept pilot was filmed on a shoestring budget. The Sandwiches came away with one clear lesson - if this was going to be done properly, it needed the proper funding. After more than a year’s worth of pre-production, fundraising, blood, sweat, tears and love, everything is full steam ahead - we just need that little bit extra to make it the production it deserves to be.

 

About the rewards

Our rewards are all stacking and pretty darn sweet. Obviously, all proceeds go to the production of the series. The more you spend, the better our crew will eat - so please - think of the boom swinger. Dig deep.