Cath Murphy

So yeah, it's an amazing forum. I think amazing um, tool to use.

Animator and educator Cath has a rich history in animation spanning more than 20 years and has won numerous awards in film for animation writing, directing, producing, and visual effects, a registered nurse with extensive experience in mental health Cath's approach to animation is all about social inclusion and the impact it can have on working and emotional life.

And I've worked in, um, lots of alternative education settings and taught newly arrived kids who, uh, looking for an alternative education experience. Often students had never been to school, particularly the girls they'd spent, you know, a few months in detention centers here and then came to English language centers where they learned. All of what was required of our primary school system and then maybe half of our secondary and then just started secondary school.

So, uh, the teachers of these institutions were amazing people. And so we got the opportunity to work with them showing visually based films that had no dialogue, which meant the kids would sort of understand the narrative straight up. And then with that, we worked with interpreters and we, I chose animation because it was an opportunity for the young people to learn literacy, using a diagram based program. So they really didn't actually have to have any literacy to start.

And the hard lesson that I learnt over say 10 years was that teenagers love to watch it. And they love the sort of immediate creative process. But the time consuming element of animation is something that not everybody loves. And, uh, so often I would complete works or I would get some older animators that I work with to complete them and some young ones as well.

And so where our project has ended up is that we now work with older women who have not had the opportunity to have a sort of digital education experience. Very little education experience, which of course impacts on their employment opportunity. And those women like me love to sit for hours doing a slow meditative work. So I'd probably get up most days and draw for three hours early, early. And I have probably, you know, I think it's, I started maybe 30 years.

It was sort of like one of those Epiphanes that my project needed. And, uh, it's been incredible for the project. So we've started working on this animation series called socially sanctioned, which is about socially sanctioned, abuse, quite a few people, mostly women talking about their own experiences. And so animators.

Who, uh, some just starting out some people who I've worked with quite a long time, uh, creating these short animated documentaries with me, uh, for people who have not had educational opportunity, young or older, you know, it's just, they are so excited about it just as a learning experience.

Often it's been word of mouth and, uh, there's somebody who knows somebody who has had a complicated mainstream education experience, you know, maybe difficulty reading or just, you know, had some issues around traditional education. And, um, there is absolutely no shortage, like at the moment, I think for women older than 50, they're the greatest growing homeless demographic.

And so, uh, we've actually formed a community relationship with the Whittlesey community house and a big part of their focus of their education program is for women who are unemployed because the stats out there, it's something like 20% for women over 50. So. Yeah, that it's not a hard gig to fill I was a ceramicist for a long time and took a trip to India for about six months with a mate.

And it was one of those trips where you have those Epiphanes because you're so far removed from your own scenario. And I'd always loved film from a very young age, but, you know, I grew up as a working class kid, you know, it was just a bit too pie in the sky. And then I went, okay, this is what I want to do. So I got back to Melbourne and just did a couple of TAFE courses using Photoshop and couple of other animation programs. Pretty simple. Did a few script writing courses.

I think I, AFTRS ran a couple of short ones and, uh, one of the things that was really great then was that people who were in my world pretty famous. were doing short courses, but TAFE at AFTRS, you know, people who you thought would have no time or, you know, there's always that fantasy that everybody's working. But, um, so that was an amazing opportunity. And so then I did a graduate diploma at VCA film school in 98 as an animator because I'd worked in clay for years.

I actually ended up doing this under camera thing, where I drew into clay. And so I created this, my animation doing that, which was lovely because it was a really full-on environment. Fantastic, very stimulating, highly competitive, which was really a bit foreign to me. And, um, to do this particular technique, I had to be locked away in a room. So I escaped a lot of heat. And, um, so I got lost in that for the year.

And. I think what I discovered that year, it was that my thing is narrative simple linear narrative. I really love it. I love to watch it and I love to make it. And it's not always fiction, like the project that we're working on now, they are people's stories.

So, um, They have fundamentally, I guess, a beginning, middle and end a bit like simple narrative structure, but, uh, probably normally I would work in fiction and, um, but I ended up on this documentary series that's how life goes, you know, better not to shut the door. One of the things that we learnt in film school was how to make things move, which is what you do, of course, as an animator. And I probably found that the most boring part. So I use this technique.

That's been around forever since Disney, a hundred years where I film whatever it is I want to use in my film. It might be a person talking or, you know, a dog chasing the pig or something. And. That footage goes into an editing program and you can spit it out as JPEGs. And then those JPEGs get traced in what I use Photoshop elements, because you know, all I need and there's lots of diagram based programs that do the same thing.

And that's what we use in our project, because it's incredibly easy to use and learn. And you actually don't have to be literate to use it, which is sort of extraordinary, you know, animation takes you somewhere else. And so this series that we're working on at the moment is quite difficult to stomach at times, watching somebody talking about those things as a live piece. It's pretty difficult, but watching something once removed as an animation, you know, it sort of allows you to stay with it.

And it means you actually sit with the content a lot more than if you were .. Cause, you know, it's easy to actually turn off when something is really difficult in subject matter. So it's surprisingly good as a fit. Yeah. You know, like when we were working with younger people and just, you know, we were showing them really mainstream Pixar shorts that had no dialogue. I remember there was this one really insightful boy.

And he w we were watching this animation that was, you know, overtly about bullying. Whole lot of small birds bickering, and then they hammered this old, bigger sort of unusual looking one. And what he said was, uh, it reminds me of my relationship with my closest friend. Sometimes we fight, we don't even know why we fight. We can't bear to go there because the friendship is so important to us. And so. If there's an avenue to deflect it as in hammer, somebody else, we sometimes do that.

The complexity of it, you know, if you just watched that, particularly as a teenager, I think you'd feel lectured if it was just somebody saying to you, you know, can you see what you doing? Blah, blah, blah. So, um, whereas the students were really receptive. And they got it. It was really, it was a great process. Actually. I worked in aged care for a long time, which was very rewarding because the people who work in that area, if you find a spot, it's a lovely community.

And then I ended up in adolescent mental health. And so a lot of the work that we did was about engaging young people who felt disenfranchised by a particular setup or, you know, needing something else. And then I took a bit of time off, you know, during COVID and we did a bit of work remotely and all that sort of stuff, but yes, I still do. And I'm about to start working at the children's, the sorry, the Austin on the kids' unit.

I grew up in a family where it was important in a very positive way to make a contribution. I think it's definitely influenced how I work. I, I think about what the culture I grew up in, in the seventies. Where opportunity was much greater and the playing field was much leveler. And now I think we live in a very mercenary setup where the only way it can work is if most people actually don't earn quite enough. And so we're in a different spot socially than we've ever been, which is a shame.

And I think it will change. Actually. I feel quite optimistic, but I think for me to run a project. Making professional films and offering work to people who, uh, need an opportunity and who completely embrace it. Like it's a real, it's a, for me, it's a win-win and we, last year we screened the first documentary of our series at St. Kilda film festival. And there were a couple of animators who came and who'd worked on the film. It was just an incredible experience for them. Like the thrill of.

You know that it's part of a professional setup. You know, the playing field is extremely, even they do the work that I do. And, uh, it's a thrill to do it as a group really. I happened to be living down near Apollo bay. And I had a three-year-old and I could have nursed, but the , the hours are insane. So, I went ok better to do something else and I, I was working as a professional animator up until that point.

And the thing that you when, especially if you, when you live in the country, you realize. How little the students have access to just in terms of, you know, educational experiences, you know, so, uh, I started running these workshops. Um, first was just the primary school next door. And then we a couple of more remote towns down on the west coast and it grew into the rural animation project.

And, um, I remember we made this gorgeous film with the kids at this primary school about this boy who got taken up in a space ship. And anyway, one of the students at the school, you could really tell he embraced the project so much, that was potentially something he would do having based on that experience. And they were having a local film festival and they were only allowed to take a certain number of kids in adults that was just cause it was a whole lot of primary schools together.

And so it had to be the senior kids and he wasn't a senior student. I've never seen a child so upset. So I said to the head teacher, I don't know what you have to do, but this boy needs to go. They found a spot for him, of course. And he was just beside himself. He was so excited. And, you know, I think that is a common experience when you offer something that just wouldn't have been an opportunity in an environment that is remote. Then I ended up working with Berry Street a bit.

And they worked with a lot of marginalized, teenagers worked in Wangaratta and, um, I'm still in touch with a couple of mental health clinicians who worked on a couple of projects there. And then we ended up with the English language center in Shepparton, and, uh, students, I, I talked about them before, but they came from the detention centers and some students had been to school, but not. Often they'd learned, learned English for the first time at the detention centers.

And then they were to learn, you know, in a sort of really condensed way, what we would learn for six years of primary school and then secondary and then off they'd go. So, and I remember once we were, I was showing a film that had no dialogue so that all the students, we had lots of interpreters. Often we would have five in the room at the time. Cause there'd be, there might be 10. Different cultural groups in the classes.

And, uh, there was one student who was watching the film and really enjoying it. They're all pretty light in superficially. And the one of the teachers says, ah, she's been here for 10 weeks. That's the first time I've seen her smile. A couple of the shorts that they made and they, they absolutely initiated the storyline and they, I think they won best animation at the Australian teacher of media awards one year. And they got nominated for best doco in the professional section.

And that was, I mean, they drove them, you know, I was just, I'd help them with a storyline and how to make them, but they, they did everything acted in them and generated the story and, you know. , it was great. Um, one of the things that we used animation for was to try and reorientate a person's self perception around their capacity to learn because mainstream education. Is incredibly rigid.

And you know, if you have a, an average or a phenomenal memory, you'll get a top mark, but there's lots of different ways that people are designed to learn. It was a way of offering an alternative and challenging that. There's this thing in mental health, they call it a cognitive behavioral tool and.

Normally, it would be about challenging phobias or notions, but, uh, in a way, the, to work on a project where you let's say you draw 500 images, you are absolutely not in your head, which is what I love about it. So I'll get up in the morning and I'll go, okay, maybe I'll do a couple of hundred images or something and I'll put my headphones on and I'll start to draw. And so. Everybody in life now, you know, COVID was a real stark reminder of just how much, how insanely busy we are.

And so as soon as you wake up your head starts, cause you've got to do 45 things before you get in the car to this whole process. For me. Stops it, that is more than just about drawing. The whole sort of mental process is a very peaceful and I've been doing it for a long time and I still love it.