Environmental Film Festival Australia

OVERVIEW

In 2017, the Environmental Film Festival shifted their focus even more towards stories from the community by supporting local organisations to tell their own stories using smartphones and affordable equipment.

With support from Bank Australia, the Environmental Film Festival offered a select group of eight environmental organisations the opportunity to attend a free 2-day workshop with Digital Storytellers on how to make their own digital content.

The films were screened at the start of several of the feature film screenings during the festival.

CERES Community Environment Park

“I absolutely loved the course! The programme brought different people with common goals together, providing a creative and inspiring setting to extend our storytelling skills. The process from story canvassing to filming and editing was much more straightforward than I anticipated and I found the whole experience very empowering. Kim and Tania were wonderful facilitators and the ongoing support was greatly appreciated and much needed… Seeing our shorts up on the big screen was also a great bonus to the programme!” – Kat Young, CERES

REGROUND

Reground is a sustainable waste education service. Reground redirects organic coffee waste away from landfill, redistributing it to gardens city-wide, reducing the carbon impact of coffee consumption.

“Creating short films for EFFA has been a truly wonderful and rewarding opportunity for myself, Reground, and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC). The Digital Storytellers weekend workshop covered fundamental elements necessary to all stages of the filmmaking process. With skills gained in storytelling, the construction of interview questions, framing of shots, principles of good lighting, mise en scene, and audio, and editing techniques in Adobe Premiere, I was able to work on compelling short films for Reground and AYCC.

I believe that these films will inspire and motivate action from audiences in ways that other mediums cannot and hope that this program continues to run in future years, giving the same opportunity to other local or grassroots sustainability organisations. I would gladly work with EFFA and Digital Storytellers again.” –  Joshua Blood, AYCC & Reground

Fair Food Challenge 

The Fair Food Challenge is empowering university communities to build fair, healthy and accessible food systems.

“It was such a good experience to participate in the Digital Storytellers workshop – I walked into the room not having a clue how to put together a video and by the end of the weekend felt I had a grasp on a really useful new skill. We’ve made a couple of videos for our organisation and are already starting to see how much difference its making to our comms. Doing the program through the Environmental Film Festival meant we got the chance to meet some amazing young change makers and we’re looking forward to see what all the other participants have been up to” – Sophie Lamond, Fair Food Challenge

Less Meat Less Heat

Less Meat Less Heat (LMLH) is a grassroots, non-profit organisation dedicated to shifting societal attitudes towards meat consumption and as such curtailing agriculture’s damaging influence on the global climate.

“Thanks for giving LMLH the opportunity to participate & share our work. I really enjoyed the workshop, it was well organised, the content was very well taught, the amount of content was ideal for a 2 day workshop and it was a lot of fun! For someone who had absolutely no experience in film-making or anything related with digital art, the workshop was really easy to follow. I really like how it was practical and we got to practice recording the interview/footage and received feedback on it. I have never thought about how big an impact storytelling through films can make and the workshop made me realise the importance of storytelling and how crucial it is to connect with the audience when we’re trying to spread a message especially in the context of making social change. It’s an awesome program and I will with no doubt recommend Digital Storytellers to anyone interested in storytelling and filmmaking. ” – Dionysia Evitaputri, Less Meat Less Heat