Little Big Shots 2011

After posting about the festival’s background, the 2011 launch and the jury screening it is finally time to talk about the 2011 festival itself!

The festival is always centred around the Queen’s Birthday weekend. This year it commenced on Thursday, 9 June and finished on Monday, 13 June. The programming is structured to be family friendly and also school-friendly. The screenings on Thursday and Friday are during school hours. All screenings are during the daytime, with none finishing after 6pm, and sessions generally commencing around 9:30-10:00am. The Melbourne program for 2011 can be found here.

There were over 80 short films in this year’s festival. Films are put into various packages of around an hour each. There are 10 film packages, including one that consists entirely of Australian child-made films. Each package contains at least one Australian film and one child-made film, and the packages are designed to accommodate children of various ages. There are film packages for children as young as 2 or as old as 15, or if you’re an adult who hasn’t really grown up like me, then I suppose there’s no real age limit!

Alongside the film program, there were a couple of workshops: Kaleidoscope, which allowed children to make a short documentary about Melbourne’s multiculturalism and the Splash! Animation workshop, which let children star in animation. You can see the results of this year’s Splash! workshops on Youtube. I’ve also embedded one of the videos below. Also, there is the Little Big Shots Festival Club, which is down in The Cube on ACMI's ground floor level.

 Films Made by Aussie Kids

I attended sessions on Saturday and Sunday. The highlight is always the package of films made by Australian kids. I’ve already discussed at length about what I thought were the best films in this package. After this package is shown, any children in the audience involved in making one of the films gets to come down and take any questions from the audience or the festival director. In attendance were Reuben Morgan (Searching for Nessie), Asher Karahasan (Wally the Watcher), Lucas Haynes (Nothing More, Nothing Less), some of the Yarraville West Primary School students (A Duck out of Water), and Miranda Rose, Noah Maxwell, Oliverio Perry y Fufori, Lucas Austin and Alexandra Kraus (Wizard Still and the Haunted House).

Some of my memories of the Q&A session included:

• Asher Karahasan brought along the bus prop he made for his film. The hardest part to shoot was the bus going over the hill.
• One of the Yarraville West Primary School students said that several copies of each claymation model had to be made, because they would eventually fall apart after shooting.
• Each frame in the claymation films has to be photographed individually.
• Lucas Haynes spoke most precociously (he’s 13 years old). I can’t remember exactly what he said, but when he starts talking about his next film examining the subconscious etc., you know that you’re not listening to an average 13 year old.
• Reuben Morgan quite likes working by himself – no siblings involved!
• The youngest child involved in making a film was 5 years old – one of the filmmakers of Wizard Still and the Haunted House.
• Festival director Chloe Boulton handled the session with aplomb, especially those awkward silences where a child doesn’t quite know how to respond to a question.

Post-screening Q&A with children filmmakers

Other Packages

On Saturday, I also saw Package 3. Ormie was an obvious highlight, as described in my post on the festival’s launch. However, the true highpoint was The Gruffalo based on the classic eponymous book. It was a delight, and worth the price of the ticket alone.

The Gruffalo

On Sunday, I saw Package 8 first, which consisted of The Lost Thing and Superhuman as its highlights, as discussed in my post on the children’s jury screening. Also worthy of mention was the German animated film The Little Boy and the Beast, which uses the transformation of a boy’s parents into beasts as a metaphor for their character transformation after a divorce.

The Little Boy and the Beast

Package 7 highlights included Minnie Loves Junior and A Duck Out of Water, already discussed in previous posts. Gorilla from Finland – a typical setting of a younger sister wanting to play with her older sister, which in turn leads to an atypical resolution was also worth watching. This package was followed by a Q&A session with Andy Mullins, the co-director of Minnie Loves Junior. He talked about underwater shooting and the universal love theme of the film, and the difficulties in getting the children to spend so much time in the cold sea. As mentioned previously, I found this film most endearing, so I was keen to have a short chat with Andy Mullins afterwards, particularly about how he cast the film, and his future projects. His answers proved most enlightening.

Following my chat with Andy, I made myself slightly late for my final package, Package 4. So I missed out on a couple of films, Mobile (which was reputed to be a festival highlight), Mira, Small Being’s Life, and part of Tiger. Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to try to catch them when I volunteer at Little Big Shots some time. I saw Ormie again, which I never cease to tire of. Apart from that Marcel the Shell with Shoes On which had a very wry and cute sense of humour, while the story of The Yellow Balloon, held the audience spellbound, and is a perfect example of how small moments can make for big stories.

The Yellow Balloon

So that’s it for Little Big Shots 2011 in Melbourne. Chloe Boulton has finished her fourth and final festival as director, and the reins are now passed onto Ben Laden. Little Big Shots now goes on tour nationally and perhaps internationally too. Whether you are a filmwatcher, a filmmaker (child or adult), or thinking about volunteering or donating, if my posts on the festival have interested you, please ensure you get involved in Little Big Shots 2012!