Glenwood High School students win first place in MobileMuster short film competition

Students from Sydney’s northwest has been rewarded with a national short film prize after combining sci-fi with Charlie Chaplin mime. See their film here.

The creativity of northwest Sydney school students has been rewarded with a national prize, after they combined sci-fi elements with classic Charlie Chaplin-esque mime to create a short video on the importance of recycling.

Students from Glenwood High School in northwest Sydney took out first place in the MobileMuster film competition, where they were tasked with creating a one-minute film and judged on its relevance to the theme, as well as their creativity, technical skills and ability to convey an environmental message.

Glenwood High School’s team of Kaiden, Sid, Malachi, Abby, Tamika, Archie, Cody and Liam took out first place in the lower secondary (years 7-9) division.

The competition, launched in 2019 by phone recycling business MobileMuster, is centred around engaging schoolchildren to think about how Australians can better recycle their mobile phones and tackle the ever-growing problem of electronic waste.

The Glenwood High School students short film addressed the issue through a character deciding whether to throw his old mobile phone into the bin.

Glenwood High School students as aliens from 3022 judging our current phone recycling decisions.

The film features a modern day person deciding what to do with their old mobile phone.

The film depicts the outcome of his decision by transporting the audience into the year 3022 — one where the world is either piled high with mobile waste or one where the outcome is a pristine environment.

Aliens from the future comment on all the gold, lithium and copper which goes to waste in landfill, marvelling that 99 per cent of a phone is recyclable, before leaving the audience with a warning to recycle their phones before it is too late.

The winning class’ teacher, Ms Arwa Naif, said she though the short film competition would be a great project for her creative and performing arts class.

“The ideas and scripting, including information selected, was devised entirely by the students,” Ms Naif said.

“They came up with the genre of ‘sci-fi meets mime’ based on what they have been learning in drama class and what fit with the storyline they’d created.

“Kaiden plays the mime and Sid plays the alien … Malachi selected and designed the slides using Canva, Abby selected and created the costumes (and) Tamika sourced the props.”

Malachi With Ms Arwa Naif receiving their award.

Ms Naif said she was incredibly proud when she found out her students took out top honours in the competition.

“I was really impressed with the students understanding and vision for the film and … it felt quite exhilarating to know that the class had won,” she said.

“It was one of those great teaching moments where you’re reminded what great things can be achieved when there is joint effort and collaboration.”

Glenwood High School’s winning team.

Malachi and Kaiden, two of the students who helped create the film, said the whole project was a team effort.

“In class we were doing drama and miming was one of our topics,” Malachi said. “We decided to go with the Chaplin-type mime (and) Liam came up with the idea of going into the future (while) Abby suggested aliens.”

Both were ecstatic when the news of their win came through.

“(I was) excited and overjoyed, literally jumping out of my seat. I was surprised we came first out of so many schools,” Malachi said.

Kaiden added: “I was screaming ‘Oh my God!’ (because) I felt surprised and obviously proud.”

Dudley Public School in NSW won the lower primary school division, PEAC North Metro Education Region in Western Australia won the upper primary school section and the upper secondary (years 10-12) winner was Chancellor State College in Queensland.

Each winner was awarded a JB Hi-Fi voucher valued at $3000.