Getting Grubby with dirtgirlworld

mememe productions’ Cate McQuillen talks to TV Kids about dirtgirlworld, a series that aims to teach kids about sustainable living, mixing 3D animation, photomontage and live action.

Occupying the intersection between fiction and reality, dirtgirlworld is a weird-looking show, according to creative producer Cate McQuillen, and it’s certainly one that has sparked a lot of conversations. The series, which has been on the air for ten years and aims to teach kids about sustainable living, mixes 3D animation, photomontage and live action. “The reason we wanted to have real eyes and real mouths in the animation is because I wanted the kids to feel that when those eyes are looking at them, whether they were telling a happy story or not, that there was a connection to something deeper than a 2D animation character, that they had soul,” McQuillen says.

Filmed in McQuillen’s back garden in the Australian bush, the series is produced by a group of about 35 creatives from mememe productions—musicians, storytellers, writers, gardeners—who gather for six or seven weeks each year to shoot the show, “so quite an interesting mix as kind of a creative source and thinking behind the project to start off with,” says McQuillen. “We were already unusual when we stepped in, and I think perhaps that was a lot of our appeal to people—that we were very different from a lot of the producers that were around.” During filming, they live in tents and eat from the garden as they go. “We filmed it so that as soon as we finished filming it, we ate it for dinner,” she says. “It’s not just the fact that we create content around sustainability; we create content sustainably.”

The show was commissioned by the ABC in Australia and bowed in 2009—Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had come out a few years prior, putting climate change at the forefront of the global consciousness, and alarm bells were starting to reverberate. The ABC wanted a kids’ show that had eco-friendly values, but not in an academic or preachy way. dirtgirlworld is a “narrative-driven story world that was about friendship and love, fun and nature, and had this sort of embedded sustainable living theme, without hitting anyone over the head with a hammer,” says McQuillen.

She continues, “So we wanted to make this world that had an absolute beauty about it to remind people that the world is beautiful. You protect what you love, and the notion of making this project was to engender that love of nature. It’s kind of like a long tale of connecting people back with nature in this sort of lovely way.”

The idea for the show came about when McQuillen and her partner, who were admittedly city slickers, bought a little old church in the bush and converted it into a house. They started growing their own food and connecting with nature in a way they hadn’t before. McQuillen stood in awe of the knowledge that the children in her new community had of the natural world, how they knew which animal would come scurrying out from under which rock. She knew that there wasn’t a large variety of entertainment that reflected these children’s lifestyle. “And I just thought, I love storytelling, is there a way for us to create a story world that is relevant to them?” she says. “And the naivete was, well how hard could it be to make a television show?”

And so the journey into creating dirtgirlworld began, with the show first being made using only animation and eventually morphing into its current mixed-media form. The series then spun out from there, with various real-life dirtgirl initiatives cropping up after the show’s broadcast success. “We moved into working with the government on waste management, so when they roll out a bin now, you can put your organic food waste in as well as your garden waste,” says McQuillen. “We do campaigns across [Australia] around composting, recycling, anything to do with sustainability; we’re kind of the ambassadors for those projects.”

McQuillen and the mememe productions team have indeed put their money where their mouth is when it comes to sustainable living. “As much as we’re storytellers, we’re changemakers,” she says, noting that they have chosen to abandon the traditional merchandising route for the show, “and that’s because predominately, a great percentage of that merchandise ends up in landfills or ends up breaking or not being used.” Even when presented with the idea of creating a line of branded kids’ gardening tools based around the show, McQuillen hesitated, instead encouraging people to go out to second-hand shops and purchase used tools. “For us, it was about not creating more waste or even creating more consumers who love to consume,” she says.

McQuillen has her sights set on taking dirtgirlworld and its eco-friendly message around the globe, hoping the show can do for kids in other countries what it’s done in Australia. “I’d love to create a league of dirtgirls around the world. Instead of having the Marvel heroes, why can’t we have a league of dirtgirls?” McQuillen asks. “Why can’t we have a Vietnamese dirtgirl and get grubby there, and an Indian dirtgirl and a U.K. dirtgirl and a U.S. dirtgirl and a German dirtgirl?” She hopes international expansion will help people realize that it takes an army of voices making small changes locally in order to affect global change.

dirtgirlworld encourages kids to reconnect with nature, reminding them to “go outside and get grubby” and that “the little things make a big difference,” McQuillen says. “And this is the adult conversation about this; kids would say it’s about going outside, getting grubby and having fun. They’re just connected to the joy of it.”