Writing Short Films: Radio Interview on YouTube

Jessica Au wrote a great post about short films at Spike, Meanjin’s blog. It explored some of the implications for short filmmakers who screen their movies at festivals and online. This inspired me to create a short video about writing and producing short films. I used a radio interview broadcast on Triple J featuring Zan Rowe and myself during the 2005 St Kilda Film Festival. I had heaps of fun cutting this together. It was great to revisit the interview and learn how to use iMovie, which I found to be both easy and frustrating at the same time – I’m used to using Premiere on the PC.

This Is Not A Hobby

The Emerging Writers Festival was held in Melbourne last month. They ran some great sessions about opportunities, challenges, tips and tricks for writing and publishing in Australia. Being a writer is tough. Support networks do exist, however, and it’s refreshing to feel more connected in real world spaces when writing can be such a solitary pursuit. I only went to the festival’s opening night (which was very cool), but I did write an article about writing, rejection and uncertainty as my contribution to dialogue around young people and creativity. The piece was published by Meanjin in this month’s issue:

Meanjin is an important literary journal and it feels great to have my first story for this publication – plus Sophie Cunningham’s editorial about feminism really nailed how I and others feel about negative reactions to women in various cultural spheres:

“I’ll just say this: either women can’t sing, paint, write or think as well as they used to—certainly not well enough to offset their tendency to become less beautiful with age—or we live in a culture that does not like the things women say or does not know how to hear them when they say it.”

A Month of Conferences

The end of 2009 is shaping up as conference time for me. I will be presenting on the use and application of ICT to communicate messages of health and wellbeing for refugee and migrant communities at:

• Empowering communities: learning from community informatics practice (Prato Community CIRN Conference, Italy, 4-6 November 2009)
• Digitally Empowering Communities: Learning from Development Informatics Practice (3rd International IDIA Conference, Berg-en-Dal Camp, Kruger National Park, South Africa, 28 October 2009)
• Making Links 2009: Social Action and Technology (17-18 November)

I will also be presenting on writing for short film production at the 2009 AAWP Annual Conference: Margins and Mainstream, Hamilton, New Zealand, 26-28 November.