Dirtgirlworld

Dirtgirlworld

Dirgirl wants you to 'go and get grubby'.

ABC TV has a brand new Australia kids series called Dirtgirlworld which will screen on December 4th 2009 on ABC1 and ABC2.

Dirtgirlworld is an incredible unique series for kids. The animation series will follow Dirtgirl, a gumboot wearing girl who grows awesome tomatoes, knows the names of clouds and drives a big orange tractor. She is joined by her best friend called scrapboy, a cowpunk who's a whiz with junk; grubby with her worm's eye view, Ken the Weevil, Roger the Rooster and the Chicks, Hayman the monosyllabic scarecrow and the green thumbs - real kids in real gardens having unreal fun.

This is an Australian production, produced by Cate McQuillen and Hewey Eustace.

Together with Dirtgirl we can encourage kids of today to go and get grubby in the garden!

Interview with Cate McQuillen

Cate McQuillen is one of the producers of Dirtgirlworld.

Where did the idea for Dirtgirlworld come from?

Cate McQuillen: I think the first idea really came because Hewey and I, who used to live in the city, moved to live in the countryside. A lot of the people we were meeting, in a very different life, had young children and it was amazing to watch how 'in to' being outside they were. So, from seeing little kids being outside and also just from moving to the country and really starting to dig living and growing food and all that sort of stuff. It was something we were doing and something we were also seeing and seeing how much fun kids had just being outside.


What do you hope Dirtgirlworld inspires audiences to do?

Cate McQuillen: I think, I really love this feeling that you protect what you love. So, if you think you are going to protect something, if you love it you're more likely to protect it. So, for me it is taking that idea, that kids are inspired from the show just to step outside and fall in love with what is outside and therefore grow up into kids who are really protective; so it is really easy to make environment choices. Because you love the environment so much you make really great choices for it.


How did you create such a unique series?

Cate McQuillen: It is unique, I think because Hewey and I have a music industry background, so a lot of the stuff that we love visually has been that sort of music video look. So I think we were inspired by all the kinds of freedom that you get making visuals in music videos. It unlocks something in us creatively. Because the show has so much music in it as well, we wanted something that was really interesting looking but that looked different- when the characters are looking at the camera because they have some 'real' bits in them it is like that they are really taking to you. It is almost like the best bit of a live action show, where you feel like you can see the characters and see what they are feeling because you can see their heart in their eyes. Take that with the really cool, fabulous animation brings- which is the fantasy and imaginary stuff as well, we combined the two together to get the best of both worlds, and we thought that would be really cool. We wanted it to be really interesting looking, we wanted it to be a visual feast for little kids because we wanted to have 'real' bits in the art work, so real lettuces or real tomatoes in amongst all the drawn things. This was because we wanted kids to realise when they were at a shop and they were looking at a tomato we wanted them to make the connection that it grows in the garden, so they felt it was real. We love it. It is one thing having an idea, it was a great idea, dream and vision, but then it is finding really awesome people here in Australia who could actually make that happen, that was really good. To think that we have all these fantastic animators here, who could sit with us while we say 'Yeah, Yeah, Yeah' and then when you see it you just go 'Wow! That is fantastic!'


Do you plant vegetable seeds and other plants in your garden?

Cate McQuillen: Yes, absolutely. That is where it all started. I think I really thought that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life, grow vegetables. It is really amazing, it is more than that. We do live in the middle of no where, we are on the North coast but we are a 60 kilometer trip to the nearest shop. We love growing our own vegetables but it is also really easy, it is way easier for me to go out to the vegetable garden at night and pick some lettuce and bring inside than it is for me to go to Coles.

We also look after, our own water, we don't have town water and we have solar hot water and loads of things put in place to live a sustainable life. It is not just about growing veggies it's about thinking about the choices we make and knowing how much fun there is living a sustainable life. I think that is what I thought I would do for the rest of my life. Get up in the morning and go outside and be sustaining and at night time we would sing in a band, so we had the best life every. We would sing music at night time and be outside gardening, digging fruit and feeding the chooks during the day. It is funny when you grow up in the city, I would pick everything and make jam and make pickles, it sounds so home spun and then I would go out and sing in a band at night. Best of both.

For years and years and years we just did that and then we got this idea, of being about to share how much happiness we get in our life with other people. That is another reason we did songs first, 20 songs and everybody loved the songs so much. In my head the stories got bigger and became episodes. Then, we won a couple of competitions pitching the idea then all of a sudden there we were with really fantastic broadcasters from around the world, putting their hands up saying 'We want to give a message to kids on how fantastic and fun it is to live a green lifestyle.'


What research went into writing this animated series?

Cate McQuillen: A lot of research. As well as having writers, I've written half the script and two Canadian writers have written the other half, when we picked writers we picked writers who were really into it but we also had an educational consultant. We would do fairly massive research by our selves as writers anyways, then she would look, she wasn't just an educational consultant she was an environmental education consult and she is really cool; she had fantastic ideas for not just stuff that is on the television but stuff that really happens on the website too, which was great!

There was loads of research to make it perfect, some times it is really hard to tell something simply, that is a really tricky thing. It was taking big ideas and then trying to get them into a way that kids could hear and understand what was going on, I think we have done a pretty good job all round, making sure that the message is still there but it is wrapped in a really funny, kooky way.


Have you given any children sneak previews, if so what was their response?

Cate McQuillen: We are really lucky because there are some little kids in the show that are real kids that Dirtgirl connects with via the spider web. There are 51 of them that go to school on a beach in the Northern Rivers. They grow all there food at school, primary school, then they cook it up in the canteen for lunch. They have a compost monitor who collects the compost and takes it to the pile after lunch. They are fantastic kids. They have seen heaps of the episodes and they love them, of course they love them because they are in them as well.

We have done audience testing all along the way, because if you are trying to do something new, people like to test it along the way, to make sure it will be fine. I would come along and say 'I think we need real faces' and everyone would look at me, then they would test it on the kids and everyone would love it.

The shows started in Canada and the UK a week before Australia, they have started ahead. We have already received fan mail, people are twittering and people are on blogs, parents on blogs talking about it. It was weird because it happened before it started here, in Australia.

I hope we get a whole lot of kids and families and people just going, actually it is quite fun to make a green choice.

This is a dream come true for us; it was a little dream in our heart and to go from that to this is a dream come true, big time! We never imagined it would be like this.