Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This fast-paced animated clip shows the arrival of Janet Rig at the outback roadhouse home of the hero of the television series 'Li’l Elvis and the Truckstoppers’. The clip begins with Elvis and his friend Lionel racing along the road on their 'scoot boards’ when the rig (truck) driven by Janet’s mother looms into view. Back at the roadhouse, Elvis’s mother agrees that Janet can come and live with them. Elvis and Janet both refuse to share a room and the clip ends with Elvis wearing Janet’s bubblegum all over his face.

Educational value points

• The clip, aimed at an audience aged between 8 and 11, tells a fairly straightforward story but in the process lampoons a number of iconic images of Australian identity. The grazier in his Akubra hat and Driza-bone coat is shown, not shearing his sheep, but blow-drying its fleece. The driver of the heavy truck roaring through the Australian outback is not a man but a woman, who has painted her rig pink.

• Janet’s pink bubble gum is a visual device used by the filmmakers to supplement the spoken script. Sometimes its shape is critical, such as when a huge fist-shaped bubble appears in her confrontation with Elvis and explodes in his face. On another occasion, such as when Janet’s mother is leaving, the word 'STOP’ that fills the bubble prevents her mother kissing her and allows time for the parting spoken instruction, 'Go hug a truck!’

• Li’l Elvis was drawn on paper in a traditional two-dimensional style. These drawings were then digitised and imported into a computer animation program where they were painted digitally. The backgrounds for the scenes were painted with traditional paints on board, scanned and combined with the digital cells to make up the scenes. After checking, the scenes were rendered and assembled in order. Sound effects and music were then added.

• Animation of the type illustrated by this clip is the result of individual painted cells being filmed in sequence and shown at speed. Because of the phenomenon of persistence of vision, whereby the brain merges similar images reaching the eye in rapid succession, an illusion of movement is created.

• The driving force behind the animation was Peter Viska, who began his career in 1969 as a cartoonist and has since diversified into animation such as 'Li’l Elvis and the Truckstoppers’, and into illustrating children’s books such as the bestselling 'Far Out, Brussel Sprout!’ series (1995) and 'The Greeblies’ (2006). His animation company Viskatoons was founded in 1992.

• One of the writers on the production team was Robert Greenberg who, according to publicity for his various books and television series, began his writing career when he won the best sentence competition in Grade 3. Greenberg has written for the Australian Children’s Television Foundation’s 'Lift Off’ and 'Skytrackers’, both of which won Australian Film Institute awards, and he also won an Australian Writer’s Guild Award for 'Round the Twist’. In 2003, he was awarded the Centenary Medal for his contribution to the writing of Australian children’s television.

• The 'Li’l Elvis and the Truckstoppers’ series was a 26-part half-hour comedy adventure for children, produced by the Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF), a national non-profit organisation dedicated to writing and producing high-quality television programs for Australian children.