MIAF 2025 - Meet The Filmmaker #3: Heathens? Coming Soon!

While a handful of big studio names can dominate whatever space Australian animation is allowed in the headlines, the beating heart and roaring lungs of our home-grown animating community are the small and medium indie outfits.

Often they rely on catching the right wave and being strong and resilient enough to sit out the troughs, but if you want to see and feel Australian-imagined and made animation (or if you want a great job making the stuff) it’s companies just like Studio Psycho you’re looking for.

Their latest project “Heathens” is rolling out and it rocks a high-energy indie vibe that says as much about the history and ethos of the company as it does about the motley crew of characters it’s wrangling. And “Heathens” is not Studio Pyscho’s first crime against the ordinary; they have been doing this a fair while now.

A handful of “Pyschos” will come in to walk us through the development and production of “Heathens”, talk about the organic way the studio emerged out of a collective of imaginations and some of the earlier work they’ve been able to pull off.

This session is classified: Unclassified (M) Mature, not recommended for viewers under 15 years.

Please note that Backlot is NOT fully accessible. There are stairs with handrails, but no lift to the second floor where the cinema is located.