Marcus Doherty

Check out the above video for more info!

'The Palace' tells the story of two unique people at different stages in life, who connect through their inability to grasp 'grown-up' life and their desire to escape from restrictive surroundings. Ellie is a 28-year old woman living with her upper-class parents, who has an unfulfilling, demeaning job as a kitchen hand for a nursing home. When Ellie finally works up the courage to declare that she is moving out with her boyfriend Troy, her snobbish parents make their disapproval clear and force her to reconsider given her unimpressive and 'common' economic situation. However, Ellie's workplace encounter with eccentric dementia patient Hugh - an elderly man with plans to 'escape' from the aged care facility - inspires her to reevaluate her life position and consolidate separate values to her parents.



Funny, touching and honest, this film explores several important topics - dementia, age discrimination, depression, social expectations - in an engaging and entertaining way presented by a talented crew of young Australian filmmakers. Upon its completion, we hope to enter the film into several major festivals to spread its important message/themes and promote new filmmaking talent.

Project Team

As well as various expenses for such elements as props, location bookings, film equipment, transportation, colour grading and catering, we are shooting this production using 16mm film; a visually stunning yet dying medium for Australian filmmaking that is quite costly. Your donation will go directly towards the purchase and processing of our film reels. Our crew would greatly appreciate a donation of any amount to help us achieve our goal of creating an entertaining, heartwarming and original short film of professional standard.

Low budget
This film's low budget means that we will have to be very careful with how much money we spend on every aspect of production, particularly taking into account the amount of 16mm film we will require for the production. Any donation given helps alleviate the stress of working under a tight budget in which much of our own personal funds must go purely towards the material used to shoot the film.

Creative restrictions
Another challenge we face is that while we are all experienced in filmmaking, our crew are working with actual film for the very first time. We have therefore given ourselves room for multiple takes when estimating the amount of film required, in order to ensure that each scene comes out as desired in the final product. Your donation will greatly help us in paying for these reels and creating a high quality, professional short film.

Time
As we are submitting this film as a major second year Film and Television project for Swinburne University of Technology, we are working towards a very tight deadline to finish filming by early May and have the film complete in early June. This means that we have very limited time to raise funds; by donating today, you are saving us an enormous amount of stress and ensuring that we don't all have to starve ourselves in order to create a fantastic film!