Busland – The Series

It was 1997 when my partner Abi and I decided to buy a bus. We converted it into our mobile living palace and hit the road. We parked anywhere we wanted and soon met other people just like us.

We were FREE!

Mauricio had a lover in every town and was working hard to make sure that they never met each other. He called his van”The sweet ride”. It was his bachelor pad but every weekend he would transform it into a miniature night club and put on these amazing parties.

Dirty Fred was an ex marine. He had been a military policeman and after he got discharged from the army he decided to travel around in an old Citroen we called “the mobile solitary confinement cell”. He had this habit of carrying way too much on the roof of his car which came with its own set of challenges.

Lance was a blues a musician who hit it big in the early 80’s designing business software for the new personal computer wave that had hit the planet. He and his partner Donna decided to get in a van and travel around doing shows seeking their dream of becoming blues legends.

Bobarino Gravatinni was a circus performer who balanced a wheelbarrow on his head while balancing on a thing called a roll bolo high up on a table. He always seemed to have another child that he was finding out about and had this thing about shooting at birds with a bb gun if he was awaken by them singing.their morning song.

The Bean Family lived in this amazing fold out mobile castle. They had decided to live in their truck to get away from the real world and pursue sustainable living. They were always coming up with new ways to live large and spend nothing. Their lives were perfect.

Eddy was a grumpy old Belgian artist who lived in a tiny old broken delivery truck. He always had something to say about progress and politics, usually how much he hated everything. He decided to abandon his site sponsored apartment and live on the streets so that he could make his mark as a painter. He was always giving away food and helping people.

Circus Monoxide was a crew of 9 Australian circus performers who converted a double decker bus into a mobile stage that they could drive around and do shows in. They were constantly navigating the complexities of living together in a cramped bus that always seemed to be breaking down.

Dirque was a tech billionaire who had decided to run his global empire from a state of the art techno bubble car. He wanted to meet real people who lived in trucks and buses and, while incredibly antagonistic, ended up buying land all over the world so that travellers could have a place to permanently park, free of charge, when they were done with travelling.

And then there was Abi and me. I was The Space Commander and she was Nancy Neutron. Our bus, LUL 522X became our creative temple where music got recorded and films got made. It was our base of operations for my imaginary superhero crime fighting agenda. Busland is full of adventure stories, everybody encountered tragedy and triumph ss we motered around Europe in our eccentric vehicles, doing streets show, making videos, looking for places to park, living off grid and trying to make out fortunes.

Busland will exist as 10 1 hour films. Each episode will dedicate 5 to 7 minutes for the development of each of the 9 primary storylines. The cast will be comprised of 9 rmain roles and 16 recurring. The finale episode sees them all arrive at a mythical place called Busland where they have to figure out if they can actually live together in a stationary location after decades of travelling.

Shooting Busland will involve creating the vehicles that the characters live in. Locations will be determined as the vehicles are parked in a variety of visually enticing settings around urban and rural Europe. Not all of the action takes place in vehicles and so scenes will also be shot in static indoor and outdoor settings.

Busland is a cornucopia of Adventure, comedy, drama romance, crime and fantasy all presented in a graphic novel visual style.