Would the world be a better place if it were run by women? Not really, according to Sydney comic trio Skit Box.
The creative team of Adele Vuko, Sarah Bishop and Greta Lee Jackson will start shooting It’s a Woman’s World, a series of comedy sketches, at the end of next month.
It’s one of 25 projects, each budgeted at $10,000, commissioned by ABC-TV and Screen Australia’s Fresh Blood initiative designed to unearth the next generation of comedy writers and performers. All will premiere on the ABC’s iView platform.
“There will be three sketches in the series, each focusing on a different scenario that would exist in female-dominated reality,” Bishop tells IF. “These will build on the themes of our Girls Harass Construction Worker video, a gender-reversal sketch that explores what happens when women prey on passing tradies.”
The three members will write, produce and act in the sketches and will each direct one episode, their directing debuts. “Previously we collaborated with other directors, often from Jungleboys, including the Van Vuuren Bros, Craig Melville and Al Morrow,” Bishop says.
This is the trio’s second ABC commission following the special Xmas Quickie With Skit Box for ABC2 last year. The women have been producing online comedy content for the past 18 months and are now developing projects for film and television. Their short film The Polygamist directed by Craig Melville (John Safran’s Race Relations) was shortlisted for 2013 Tropfest. Another short, The Artist screened at the LA Comedy Shorts Festival last year.
Vuko plays the female lead alongside Greg Fleet and Alex Williamson in Me and My Mates vs the Zombie Apocalypse, an Australian Zombie comedy from writer-director Declan Shrubb, which was shot in January. The plot follows three telecom tradesmen who hide in a telephone exchange during a Zombie invasion.
Vuko will be seen in This Is Littleton, a four-part sketch comedy series set in a fictional town hall, looking at council employees, councillors and the grandiose Lord Mayor, which premieres on ABC2 on Thursday.
Bishop has just wrapped shooting the lead role in writer–director Megan Riakos’ psychological thriller Crushed, alongside Les Hill, Roxane Wilson and Aaron Glenane. She also served as one of the producers with Riakos and Robbie Miles, the LA-based development executive at Sam Worthington’s Full Clip Pictures.
She says the producers are looking for more funding for post-production, talking with prospective executive producers to join the project and working with Kickstarter in New York to launch a crowd-funding campaign.
Greta Lee Jackson is performing on the stand-up comedy circuit in Los Angeles and has just released the podcast Giraffe Park.