Meet the Teen Filmmakers Who Got Into Trop Jr With Short Films About Online Gaming, Robot Girls

Lily's Reboot and Kat's Rewire are both finalists in the 2019 Trop Jr festival.

"The first film I made was in Year Five," says Lily Lunder, who, now at age 14, is a contender at Australia's biggest youth short film fest, Trop Jr.

Her first project, called Boys vs. Girls, involved the whole class and became almost a year-long project.

"It ended up being like 25 minutes long," Lily laughs.

"It's definitely not my proudest work."

Thankfully, she is proud of her latest effort, Reboot, which is a finalist at Trop Jr 2019. (The fest has a grand prize of $1,500, along with a range of filmmaking development opportunities.)

Reboot follows the story of a boy—played by her real-life little brother, Elan—who becomes obsessed with online gaming and runs away from home after he's banned from it.

Image: Reboot.

"[Online gaming's] always been a big thing in our family and a lot of my friends play Fortnite, Minecraft and all those games," Lily explains to Student Edge.

"It's a fight that always comes up in our family; 'How much time [on the computer] is too much?'"

Kat Alexander, 15, has also been making films for nearly half her life.

Her Trop Jr finalist entry, Rewire, offers a 2019 twist on a classic tale: Pinocchio. In her story, we follow an old man who fashions a robot into a young girl, just like his daughter. 

Image: Rewire.

"I was thinking about [how] in our world today... women are constructed by our society," Kat begins to explain.

"How they're made to be a certain way, and that made me think of how you construct a robot or a piece of machinery.

"I kind of wanted to play on that."

But all of that deeper meaning, Kat says, can be challenging to fit into a short film that needs to be less than seven minutes in length.

"It's pretty difficult because you need to have enough in it so it's a full story with a beginning, middle and end but then you can't go over the top," she continues.

"What's good is to get a strong climax point and then work around that."

Image: Rewire

Kat reminds potential Spielbergs and Coppolas out there not to get disheartened by rejection.

"I think I've put in many [unsuccessful] films to Tropfest over the years and I just kept going and eventually became a finalist," Kat says. (Her 2018 film, Love Ella, was also selected for the Trop Jr finals last year.)

"And then I was able to do it for a second time so don't give up," she adds.

"You never know when your year's gonna be."

You can catch Reboot, Rewire and the other finalists' films at Trop Jr. at The Crescent in Parramatta Park, Sydney on Saturday 9 February.

Update (11/2/19): Kat took out the top prize at Trop Jr with Rewire.

Header Image: Supplied