This thesis consists of a full-length screenplay for a feature film called Casting Off. A summary of the screenplay is as follows:
For the last 25 years, Kiwi Elle has half slumbered through Asian Capitals, setting up house for the family wherever her mercurial, corporate husband Tom's stellar career led. Tom flourished, while Elle withered, yearning for her homeland and a tribe to call her own. Tom finally takes the promised retirement and, they are ‘home' at last. Their story begins as a visual love letter to the Hauraki Gulf, a retirement trip aboard Elle's old family boat, Aroha. All should be perfect; a healthy couple in their early 50s, in their financial prime with options galore and, their grown kids off enjoying the world. All looks perfect until it isn't. Tom has brought along a little surprise that will blow this boat out of the water. When it does, Elle is finally jolted wide awake. She leaves Aroha and her husband behind in her wake as she makes for shore on Great Barrier Island in the dinghy.
Shore landings are not always easy, and the obstacles awaiting a now castaway Elle on the Island turn out to be more than physical. Elle has old history with the place. A long-buried connection with Great Barrier Island surfaces and Elle is forced to confront just how far she has travelled from the woman she once aspired to be. When her two worlds finally and chaotically collide, Elle must choose.
The thesis is framed by an Exegesis which is a 6000-word essay on the subject of:
(a) The genre of the thesis
(b) The development process from synopsis to second draft.
