Thomas Clifford Ryan
Arts Upper Hunter
I’m Thomas Ryan, a writer/director of primarily short films, currently living in my hometown of Muswellbrook, NSW. I have a passion for filmmaking and storytelling with a particular focus on escalating the absurdity in everyday situations and feelings.
From 2021 to 2024, I studied a Bachelor of Communications at the University of Newcastle, where I had the opportunity to create a wide variety of projects, such as short films, documentaries, advertisements and music videos, to help develop my skills and even win quite a few awards. One such project entitled ‘Anamnesis’, a sci-fi thriller short that I directed in 2023, was nominated for ‘Best Student Director (Male)’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’ at LA’s IndieX Film Fest in February of 2024, and is also set to at least be screened at both the Sydney and Melbourne Lift-Off Film Festivals this year.
In 2024, I was lucky enough to join the NSW Horizons regional mentorship program, which has led me to take a more focused interest in regional filmmaking, despite the additional challenges it may pose. I look forward to finding new ways to create the types of heightened yet grounded stories and characters that I enjoy putting forward.
Links
The People of Tin City
The Funny Man
Artwork description
People of Tin City, 2024, Short Documentary
The Funny Man, 2024, Short Film
Artist Statement
The People of Tin City is a short documentary that focuses on the personal stories and unconventional lives of the people who live/used to live in Tin City, a small, off-the-grid settlement located on Stockton Beach. Researching Tin City revealed that while the settlement’s history is relatively well documented, the individual stories of those that have actually spent their lives there are not. The theme of a tight-knit community is most important here, and our more poetic approach in allowing the individual stories to weave and flow between one another aims to illustrate a world that few could ever imagine, and display just how much Tin City has shaped these people’s lives for the better.
The Funny Man is a short comedy film that focuses on a writer, plagued with insecurity that manifests in the form of mocking hallucinations. In the film, the main character suffers from procrastination fueled by self-doubt, which is a feeling that many people will recognise. I enjoy trying to embody feelings like that in my works by blowing them up to be something much more absurdly literal and encompassing to highlight just how strange we are by letting them control us. The Funny Man does not aim to embody a unique experience, but the journey and solution is uniquely fun.