Screen Australia Funded These 8 Fake Viral Videos You Thought Were Real


Screen Australia allocates $3 million to battle gender inequality in the country, according to ABC. Australia’s key funding body has recently launched a program dedicated to reducing the gender imbalance in the country’s film and TV industry.

Screen Australia will use $3 million to fund the new film and TV female-lead projects. The move comes amid the severe gender imbalance in lead creative roles in most of the nation’s movies and TV series.

Gender Matters is a program developed by Screen Australia, announced earlier this week, and will be the first project to be funded by the Australian Federal Government body.

Screen Australia has already selected 45 story ideas and 13 film and TV industry projects out of 452 projects proposed by the public. In fact, it was the highest number of projects seeking funding in the history of Screen Australia.

The campaign to make more female-lead projects was announced shortly after Screen Australia analyzed the extent of gender inequality in the nation’s film and TV industry. The Australian funding body found that women make up only 32 percent of producers, 16 percent of directors, and 23 percent of writers.

Screen Australia announced its goal to eliminate the gender imbalance in the country, hoping to achieve the 50 percent figure in the percentage of women performing creative roles in the nation’s film and TV industry by 2018.

Fiona Cameron, the chief operating officer at Screen Australia, revealed their plans to be a game-changer in the nation’s film and TV industry when it comes to gender inequality.

“The funding boost provided by Screen Australia has been a game-changer, providing the industry with an opportunity to get behind some very commercial and creative prospects.”

Cameron also revealed that Screen Australia’s project Gender Matters was divided into five programs and will provide “express-lane access” to female-lead business ideas as well as stories.

One of the programs is Brilliant Stories, which will allow female creative teams to speed up the development process of their creative ideas, and the second one is Brilliant Careers, which will serve as driving force for the implementation of business ideas for female screen-makers.

Successful projects within the first program will receive up to $100,000 in funding from Screen Australia for their films, up to $50,000 for scripted TV shows, and up to $50,000 to develop scripted online or interactive series.

The only requirement those projects must meet is that they need to have females in at least three of the four key roles, director, writer, lead character and producer. As for Screen Australia’s Brilliant Careers program, it will give out up to $250,000 in funding to develop careers and programs for women in the screen-making industry.

Screen Australia funded eight fake viral Australian videos that were viewed more than 205 million times on YouTube, according to the Guardian. The Australia’s funding body gave $100,000 in taxpayer funding to the Woolshed Company to make fake videos as part of their efforts to explore the impact of short films in the modern world.

The fake videos, which for two years were regarded as real, include such scenarios as a guy taking a selfie in a tornado. Other fake scenarios include a shark attack filmed with the help of a GoPro, a lion attacking a trophy hunter, people fighting with selfie sticks, a girl almost getting hit by a lightning on a beach and a few others.

Watch two of the videos below.

The fake videos, which were viewed in 180 countries around the world, were broadcast on the largest international TV networks, including CNN, NBC, Fox, CBS and many others.

[Photo by nicoletaionescu/AP Images via Fotolia]

Edit: The article incorrectly implied that Screen Australia funded the “Shark” and “Tornado” videos, which is not correct. Screen Australia did, however, fund the subsequent videos which were pure narratives with no advertiser involvement.

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