Recognition continues to flow for creator of 600 Bottle of Wine, Grace Rouvray.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The Sydney-based former James Fallon High student this month won the outstanding actress in a comedy award at the Los Angeles Web Series festival – LAWebfest – for her online comedy.
The eight-part series has been picked up by the BBC and will be broadcast on BBC Three from May 27.
600 Bottles of Wine focuses on a woman flung back into the single world of dating and also earned Rouvray a nomination for best comedy writer.
Rouvray told The Border Mail before the BBC announcement the show script evolved from an online blog.
“I only started writing blogs a few years ago to test material to a digital audience prior to writing the series,” she said.
“The director, Ainslie Clouston, also took an active role in script editing and producer Bec Bignell was also very active in script producing so there had been a lot of attention to detail in these scripts from the creative team.”
Clouston said the aim was to create a story the was not out of place across multiple formats, the eight nine-minute episodes have been repurposed as four 18-minutes episodes for television.
“The situation of having to gauge where you stand in a new relationship can be brutal so I wanted to add a sense of quirk and warmth,” she said.
While the script is not a factual account of her life, Rouvray said the aim was to create a story that felt real to the audience.
“As the series was created from my blog posts that I wrote there were elements of truth from my life in the beginning,” she said.
“Once in pre production for the series the producer, Bec, and director, Ainslie, and I sat down to really hone what it was to date and the tumultuous experience that can be.
“We also specifically focused on what our audience was responding to in the dating topics and conundrums I explore in the blogs.
“So in a way, all that happens in the series has been road tested, if you will, by either our creative team or our audience.”
600 Bottles of Wine is one of the earliest examples of an independently funded web series re-packaged and for a dual premiere on network television and Bignell said the mission was to recycle and re-purpose content for consumption across multiple platforms, as opposed to restricting audience-reach to one medium..
“We believe that making media with people, rather than about them, creates new story telling opportunities,” Bignell said.
“We discover stories that have not been told from a genuine standpoint, by communities that are underrepresented, fostering new talent to release these stories.”