Hungry4Adventure was our 6th Children's Film Workshop. The film is conceived, written, filmed, acted and edited by the participants;
Lower Hawkesbury kids age 10 to 18, with help from a team of volunteers and industry professionals. The project is funded by Hornsby Shire Council,
local businesses such as Fenwick's Marina, and a modest entry fee.
The journey began in 2002 with Islander's Point of View. In those days consumer video editing was mostly unheard of, and when we got the, ahem,
VideoCDs back none of us had a computer that could play them!
We were lucky to have the support and encouragement of Peter Mahony and Mike Jones of the Powerhouse Museum's SoundHouse, a collaboration that continued
for some years. With their experience in running such workshops they encouraged the children to make something familiar and simple. To our great
pleasure and surprise, the children's documentation of Dangar Island life, including their footage of people no longer with us has become an
invaluable social history treasure.
Since then, our confidence and resourcefulness has continued to improve to the extent that we ran our own video editing network
for Message on the Water in 2007.
The workshop aims to maximise the creative and practical input of the children themselves, and offer them a unique opportunity to communicate in the
language of film, to interpret media, in particular television, and to gain objectivity regarding content and process.
In this sense, one of our most successful workshops was 2005's The Mystery of the Hawkesbury River Monster, a mockumentary about the
mythical local beast of the deep. Again it was entirely written by the kids, which allowed them to draw on their own experiences,
to mix fact and fiction, and to play with the relationships between form and content.
In 2006 Gossip Game added a new element: DVD authoring. The kids loved the opportunity to work with bloopers and out-takes,
and build a package including original music, stills galleries and their previous work.
The kids' preference has always been for comedy, and our funniest film was Late in 2003, which built on the previous year’s skills and
was the first script developed by the kids and inspired by their shared experience of living on Dangar Island. We have always tried to avoid
location sound, where problems can ruin the best of takes, and the kids in Late excelled themselves as 21st century silent movie stars.
DVDs are available of all the material from the DIFS Children's Film Workshop, and there's always another workshop just around the corner.
For more info head to our Contact page