Roar Films of Hobart have chosen the Tasmanian Breath of Fresh Air Film Festival for the national launch of their new e-learning project Founders and Survivors Storylines.
Education Services Australia have now licensed the web portal for use in Australian Schools for the next five years. The new web portal will be launched with a student audience at the BOFA Festival Hub, in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Inveresk, at 2.00pm on Friday, November 9.
This will be a free event and parents, children and teachers are welcome to see this exciting new educational tool demonstrated for the first time.
Founders and Survivors Storylines is a multifaceted online project that springs from one of the world’s great historical studies of immigration, forced labour and settlement, the world heritage-listed convict records of Tasmania
Using this database of remarkable convict records, the project explores how modern-day Australia was forged by the men and women, who were forced to come here; exiled from their families and homelands, and who, against the odds, were survivors and founders of the nation.
As a Web portal, Storylines uses a creative team of programmers, writers, musicians and digital artists to explore the Founders and Survivors database in two key ways: Lifelines and Mugsheets.
Lifelines features twenty one narratives based on individual Vandemonian convict stories, bringing together contemporary songwriters and digital artists to create digital stories and music for download. Lifelines also features a series of interviews with historians, social scientists and descendants from Australia and beyond to build context for the wider transportation story, and provides direct links to the original convict records as well as a series of maps that locate convicts and their families at different stages of their life journeys.
Mugsheets uses the model of a modern social networking site such as Facebook or My Space to re-package the convict records in a form that will appeal to younger users, offering them the opportunity to interact with the records by creating convict faces and the Mug Shot identikit tool.
Festival Director Owen Tilbury said that the Roar Films Storylines project was a good illustration of the BOFA philosophy.
“BOFA is about screen based storytelling and that includes much more than cinema – creative people using television and the internet to tell their stories will increasingly become a more important part of the Festival.”
“We are delighted to launch a truly innovative web based educational program designed by a Tasmanian company.” Mr Tilbury said.
Full program details, tickets and Festival passes are available on the Festival web site www.bofa.com.au
BOFA FILM FESTIVAL: THURSDAY 8TH – SUNDAY 11TH NOVEMBER, 2012
In 2012, BOFA plans to showcase over the Thursday 8 to Saturday 10 November, international and Australian feature films/documentaries, short films, cinema related exhibitions (in partnership with Queen Victoria Museum), master-classes and parties, but, as well, is adding a new Make a Difference Day (Sunday 11th November) incorporating a free community open day, screenings of a Make a Difference Day short film competition, features/documentaries, several master-classes run by industry experts, and writers’ festival speakers all on Make a Difference themes. The Make a Difference Day will be the culmination of the festival and will highlight the purpose of inspiring “positive change”.
BOFA
