First Kiss

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This video intrigues me because (other than the fact that I’m a hopeless romantic) as far as the content goes, it’s kind of like a list. There isn’t really a story there, the creator has taken twenty strangers and asked them to pash, and recorded it.

There you have a list of twenty identical situations using different subjects, with no hierarchy- as is the nature of lists as we discussed in yesterdays Media class.

The different elements on the list, the videos, the chunks of media, have been cut up and structured, so that they do have a narrative.

There’s a clear beginning, middle and end. Nervous introductions, a build up of anticipation, the climax: the kiss, multiple of them, and the resolution, breaking up and remembering that the intimate kissers are total strangers.

So here we have a list that has been given a linear narrative.

It’s interesting because it works so well, of course because visually it’s beautiful (the guy at the start please marry me) and also it is emotionally engaging and it appeals to people’s genitalia, and things that do always win.

This is a method that could be applied to other movie making. Documenting actions, events etc, in a list like manner, creating a database, and creating a narrative from this.

Lava’d it.

Integrated Media 1, my first impression

This has been an extremely interesting class for me. Mainly because I’ve come into the second tute with no prior knowledge of the class. I wasn’t expecting Adrian Miles to be my tutor, and I had no idea what he was going on about when I walked in and he was talking about squares and circles and mobile phones and video clips.

After ten minutes I had a little insight into the class content and I want ahead and looked at Korsakow and the Adrian Miles interview on the Korsakow blog, as well as checking out some interactive videos made by past students.

I’m now extremely excited for this course. Possibly more excited than I have been for any other course that I’ve entered into at university. This is for a few major reasons.

One is to spend time in a classroom with Adrian Miles. I’ve read a few of his RMIT blog posts and I knew from the moment I read the word ‘fuck’ in one of them I knew that I would like the guy; then he went and started talking about “flirting” with scale and “the elegant indifference of lists” and the deal was cemented.

All attitude aside, through everything that I have read and the brief amount of time that I’ve spent listening to the man, I can see that he believes in what he teaches, and because of that so do I. It’s inspiring and motivating and you just don’t see it enough in Australian and I daresay global classrooms.

I’m also intrigued and admiring of the way that he utilises constantly developing technologies and apps, in the practice of everyday life. I naively held the view that relying on technology to navigate life, my career, my relationships and my work, was cheating. I’ve since changed my views dramatically and it is fantastic to see someone who validates the use of arising technologies with theory and academia, but is more practice based.

Of course there’s also the fact that he’s extremely and extensively knowledgeable about the subject, due to the fact that he’s passionate about it. I can tell that this guy reads about media and interactive film and practices it outside of an environment where he’s getting paid for it. I can also see that he’s genuinely hoping to ignite this passion, or fascination perhaps, through to his students.

The second reason is that I have always thought that interactive film is highly under-rated and under-utilized. I think that this medium would be extremely useful in advertising and I’m not sure why more companies haven’t exploited it as a medium yet. I also think, as a professional events filmmaker and also as a person who makes abstract creative films, often lacking of an obvious narrative, it would be an extremely interesting and engaging way of creative films.

I also am really interested in the nature of lists, of databases and non-linear pathways, which leads me to the third reason that I’m excited for this coming course.

I really liked Networked Media in a weird way that I’m looking forward to expanding on.

This hasn’t been a good blog post in that I’m merely stating what I like, which is simply not enough. So here are a few ways in which I can expand on the things raised in this blog post:

Integrating modern technologies is more than just practicality for life, technology is both an art form and an art medium. But it’s practicality is also an extremely cool thing and I should look at facilitating my life more with technologies and keeping myself up to date with digital skills and apps etc.
The theme for this course is relations, this is really just another way of saying “connections”, and making connections is something I’ve already blogged on, and something that I think is extremely important and useful as a pedagogic practice. I can already see a lot of connections forming in this class.
As this class is something I’ve become interested in at the outset, I should be making an effort to engage with the course, and material outside of the course, in an insightful and analytical way. This is something that I can document on my blog and I have made this one of my 5 weekly goals for this course.
Self analysis and reflection is again coming into play as a major element of a uni course and it is something that I should be taking more seriously.
Make notes of the differences in informed making and naive making. Practice informed making, even in documentation.

The Secret to Eternal Youth

My life has been particularly stressful lately, and as hard as I try I just can’t seem to be anywhere on time. Today I was running extremely late for an important appointment, despite thinking I had left with have plenty of time.

Wrong. Metro was a bastard and forty minutes later I found myself outside Richmond Station on the verge of an explosive mental breakdown, praying for a taxi.

Countless went by and I had just about thrown my phone at the cement after hearing the 13cabs hold tune for nearly ten minutes before one finally stopped.

I got in the passenger seat next to the driver -an Italian man with wrinkled eyes, a fantastic moustache and not much hair on his head, I’m guessing in his mid to late 60s- and asked him to take me to Brighton.

He told me that he was married in Brighton 31 years ago, and I asked him if he was still married. He laughed and said, “Yes, I married for love-but I still don’t know why she married me.”

He then asked me to open the glove box. Inside was a wallet, and inside that were pictures of the taxi drivers’ family. There were three wrinkled and faded school pictures of three blonde and beaming boys (one is getting engaged next week), and two pictures of his wife. One was over 30 years old, from before they were married, the other was a few years back. She looked nearly identical in both photos, besides the hair. In the first she had a stunning late 70s perm and in the second a more modern Hilary Clinton-esque style do.

He asked me to guess how old she was, I said early 40s (clearly forgetting that they’d been married for 31 years) and he laughed and told me she would turn 60 very soon.

I told him that she was beautiful and asked what her secret was.

He told me, good food, no stress and family. But mostly good food.

Then he told me to close my eyes and imagine that I was on a gondola in Venice, and he played me romantic Italian music while we drove the rest of the way to Brighton. He sang his favourite lyrics and translated them to me as, “I will always meet you here in May.”

The appointment that I was on my way to was a psych appointment, and by the time we got there I practically felt that didn’t need to go anymore.

At times in your lives you have fleeting experiences with strangers that have had a profound effect on your day and that will reach out to you at the right moment for years to come, possibly for the rest of your life. This was one of those times.

For a $26 cab ride I learned the secret to eternal, youthful beauty and took a gondola ride down a water-filled street in Venice.

Trial and error on Social Media

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of posts, I currently work as a freelance photographer and videographer. I love my job; I love capturing true emotion on film. This is what I’m good at and I hope to one day turn my passion into an alternative creative media company.

What I’m not so great at is the business planning side of things. I started freelancing just by putting an ad on Gumtree and I have gradually been growing the business ever since.

Today I decided to set aside the day to set out a business plan. I divided this into three categories.

Business goals
Here I set out the things that I want to achieve in the short term and long term, and outlined the steps in achieving them
Work efficiency
This category covers all the boring organisational stuff. Payment methods, booking sheets, editing software, file organisation and backups etc. The stuff that no one enjoys in but it needs to be done in order to work effectively.
Advertising and social media
All my advertising is done online, on free ad posting outlets and through social media. I intend to create more work opportunities and contacts by putting more effort into my online presence.

Advertising and Social Media should be the area that I most enjoy working on, but I quickly found out that it is more difficult than other people make it look.

I already have a pretty decent website up. I’m quite proud of it because I did everything myself through Adobe Muse. I also have a work Facebook page and I occasionally use my personal Twitter and Instagram accounts to post work related content.

View my blog here.

Today I set out to make the tools I already use more effective and to integrate other popular social media tools in order to reach a greater population.

I was inspired by Linh Luu’s work, he’s a classmate of mine who happens to be an extremely talented photographer and possibly an even more talented social media tycoon. His Facebook page has over 27 thousand followers.

I’m also inspired by Lakshal Perera, a wedding photographer whose work I follow through his Facebook page. Other than admiring his work, I really love the way that Perera uses his blog on his website to connect with fans of his work. He reflects on every wedding he photographs and his blog is a reflection of his amiable nature, talent and also genuinely caring work methods. This is so effective that he doesn’t even need to advertise.

I genuinely love filming weddings, and I feel a connection to the couples that I capture on film through the emotion that I sense on their big day. But this is something I find very difficult to get across, not in my work but when I talk about my work. Letting the work speak for itself isn’t enough online.

So today I went about adding a blog to my website. I had a long series of issues with embedding the blog, I tried multiple platforms and landed on one that worked. Then I had trouble uploading the photos, I couldn’t upload them how I wanted them no matter how many different methods I tried.

I decided to give that a rest and move on to something else. Adding new social media profiles. There are so many visually engaging sites that people are using these days which I could utilize to promote my work, such as:

Facebook pages
Tumblr
Pinterest
Twitter
Flickr
WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, LiveJournal etc
Instagram

I want to get my work out there, but posting individual photos to each of these platforms would just be too much work. I decided to use IFTTT in order to integrate some of these processes. Again, I had a lot of trouble. I ran into problem after problem and after five hours of work, I feel that I have accomplished very little.

I expected it to be difficult and time consuming, but I didn’t expect to be right back where I started, only with less options and a throbbing headache, after hours of work.

However, I am determined and I am going to jump right back into it. I am hoping that once I find something that works, with practice and effort it will become much easier. So adios, I have tutorials to watch, questions to Google and code to attempt. Trial and error until I find something that works, and it could be a long night.

Oh and here is a great blog post about creating great content rather than flashy content. Once I figure out how to get my content online and integrated, maybe I’ll be able to take the advice!

The best thing I’ve ever done.

Gavine, a strange fellow who never speaks but hums Bollywood songs when he hangs out the washing.

This is Bikkie, he ignores you for the most part, but if you sing his name enough (Oh Bikkie you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind Hey Bikkie) he’ll turn and face you with a huge grin.

This is Chotu, one of the sweetest boys you’ll ever meet, and Atul, one of the two carers who lives at the hostel literally 365 days a year. He gives up a regular life and the opportunity to get married in order to work there.

Raju and Babu, the best of friends. Neither can speak or use sign language, but they communicate all the same.

Raj Luxme, a 24yo woman with cerebral palsy. She was the little girl left by her parents on the train tracks and is the reason that the IID began.

Gomaal and I. She is sassy as sass comes, it took about half an hour of throwing around clothes for her to choose an outfit everyday. She pretended to hate being tickled but secretly she loved it, look at that smile.

And finally, Babu. The sweetest boy I’ve ever met, with the most beautiful smile. The only man for me.

While in India, I lived and volunteered at the Integrated Institute for the Disabled (IID) in Varanasi. The IID is a hostel, school and university for children with special needs. I worked in a classroom with the most severely disabled children in the school 30hrs a week for four and half months, and during my time off I cared for the sixteen children who I lived with at the hostel.

Now I don’t consider myself to be a particularly charitable or humanitarian person, I took the trip because I received a scholarship for it and was scared shitless for the first two weeks. It quickly became the most full on, confronting, fulfilling and joyful experience of my life.

I’ve never experienced happiness as blissful and pure at those four and a half months spent at the institute.

But it wasn’t all butterflies and roses. Out of just a handful of my students, one regularly had seizures, one vomits after every meal, three soil themselves multiple times a day, three kids will eat their poo if given a chance and as a result their hands are tied when they go to the toilet, four kids would have random violent outburst, several boys were sexually abusive towards other students and that’s just scraping the surface.

The kids rarely wash their hands, their environment is unhygienic, they often get sick, they eat the same meal three times a day, (rice, dal and potato) and don’t always have access to clean drinking water.

These issues are serious, but the staff at the IID is doing the best it can to take care of the kids while it is extremely understaffed and lacking in resources and finances.

But, all the while, the kids are extremely happy. These kids don’t realize the shitty hand that they’ve been dealt in life. Most of the children living at the hostel have been abandoned by their parents, one girl was left by her family on railway tracks, but their new family is the IID, and for a while it was my family too.

I would wake up to the strange sounds of the screaming children, many don’t speak but make strange noises constantly, and we’d go downstairs and they’d greet us with the most amazing smiles. Chotu would shout, “Didi, Didi,” meaning ‘older sister’, Raju would indicate for me to check out his outfit, generally all denim, he’s such a little dude, and Vatsal would come and hold both my hands for several minutes for no apparent reason, without making eye contact and then casually walk off again.

That was my life for four and a half months. Feeding the kids (with our hands, no cutlery in India), brushing their teeth, clothing them, cleaning up after them, playing with them, lulling them to sleep, helping a little girl with cerebral palsy learn to walk, teaching Chotu to count, playing cricket with makeshift cricket bats and balls, buying bananas in bulk and trying to stop Shantiman from snatching other kids’ treats.

It was incredible. After my long trip in 2012, I had to visit again in 2013. And my little family was still the same; some of the kids even remembered me. The IID is an incredible place, and it taught me so many important things about myself and about other people that I never expected to learn. They always say that true happiness comes from helping others. I didn’t exactly find this true, at times looking after the kids was exhausting and we sometimes felt under-appreciated, it was seeing the other kids happy that was the most rewarding of all. And earning their love. The way that Raju’s eye lit up when he saw us come down the stairs and the way Vatsal would push my legs open so that he could sit in my lap and play with the fabric of my pants.

That’s about as corny as I’ll ever get in a blog post, I hope. But it’s all true. It’s a sad and confronting place, but also the most loving and happy place that I’ve ever experienced. Here’s a video that I made in order to raise money for the Institute. It isn’t completed, but it’s the draft of what I’m working on at the moment and offers more information about the IID itself rather than my experience there.

IID Video Draft from Mardy Bridges on Vimeo.

Excellent advice.

Sometimes I forget that the greatest resources you have are the people around you. This is possibly the simplest life hack of all time but also an incredibly helpful one that people often choose to ignore: Ask for help!

And I mean with everything and anything. At uni, if you’re having trouble with one aspect of work, or you want to know where you could improve; ask a teacher, another student or someone else who knows that they’re talking about.

If the slightest health issue is bothering you, you have a headache every morning when you wake up or you think you’re more stressed than you should be, talk to a doctor about it!

Unless the person you’re asking is a complete arsehole, you’re not likely to be turned down.

Often you’ll find that your problems, as small, insolvable and insignificant as you think they might be, have the most simple solutions.

And all you had to do was ask!

Playing the sexist “PMS” trap

I should have learned by now that voicing my political opinions on Facebook is never a good idea, but I did last night and as a result, a man I went to school with came back with, “Someone needs to change her tampon.”

I wasn’t even being overly emotional, I was voicing a reasonable and evidence-based argument that Tony Abbott is a bit of a moron. I have to admit that I did use some naughty words, but that was more for emphasis of my distaste for certain racist political campaigns and some bad decisions in relation to certain environmental and educational budget cuts.

And then he pulled the PMS card.

It’s a trigger attack. Obviously this line is going to enrage almost any woman even more, and by becoming furious, as any woman would be entitled to be, she proves the man’s point.

It’s a trap that sexist morons have been leaning on for years. She can either retaliate, proving him ‘correct’ or back out, giving the man a false sense of having ‘won’. I backed out.

A friend kindly pointed out that any man who needs to use the PMS line is obviously lacking in any kind of intelligent argument or general decency. That friend happened to be a woman and this man’s response was, “Cycles are in sync.”

This happens to women who voice their opinions all the time.

It’s unfair, it is blatant sexism and even as a joke-at a woman’s expense-it reinforces the inequality that men and women have been working towards straightening out for decades.

A woman can’t be emotionally invested in an issue without some dumb arse somewhere telling her she’s “on her rags”. It’s sexist, it’s unfair and it needs to stop. It should have stopped about 40 years ago. It should never have started! But it did, it continues and it needs to stop.

Even when men use the line just to push a woman’s buttons, it genuinely does stop women from voicing their ideas. It really does.

There are women and girls out there who don’t want to stand up for themselves and their opinions because they don’t want to be seen as an unattractively emotional and angry feminist.

There’s an unfair stigma around the word feminist so that instead of simply meaning, ‘a believer in gender equality’, it implies ‘angry and emotional bitch’.

It shouldn’t be that way. If you believe that men and women are and should be treated as equals; congratulations, you are a feminist. It’s not a bad thing and no one should be embarrassed to admit it.

In fact, every decent person should consider themselves a feminist, perhaps not an active one but a feminist at least. By not doing so you’re suggesting that you don’t believe that men and women are equal and you are probably not a very nice person. Gender equality is a sensitive issue, stay away from an argument by simply saying that you believe we’re all equals, and mean it and act like it.

And don’t ever put a woman’s (or a man’s) opinions down to a by-product of PMS. Very, very uncool.

And if you were wondering, this is the video that I posted that started it all.

Connecting travel to design fiction

Two of my last posts are about Design Fiction and my travels to India. While writing my post on India, during the period of time that I was studying Design Fiction, I was struck by a connection between the two-albeit an abstract one. (Very abstract.)

I live in Australia and I live an Australian lifestyle that is very separated from the lifestyles of Indian people living in India.

For me, India is another world, almost like the speculative worlds that we discuss in Design Fiction.

I was almost like the product, the design that was thrust into a speculative world to see how I would react and how I affected the world around me.

The flaw in this theory is that I am not a piece of technology or a design, I am one person and I didn’t have a huge influence on the society around me. However, the society did have a big impact on me.

Travel is like reverse Design Fiction.

Indian Culture in Varanasi

I returned from India less than two weeks ago. It was my second trip to the wonderful country, having decided to spend December there after living there for six months in 2012.

India is a world away from Australia. The sights, smells, tastes, colours and noises are all more intense and everything works in a completely different way, but it has that familiar sense of community that gives a place its substance.

India is an incredibly diverse and interesting country. Thousand of different dialects, a myriad of devout religious communities, extremely varied cuisine, arts and fashion are just some examples of the diversity of the culture. And just to scrape the surface of the landscape there’s the coastal areas such as Kerela, the desert in Rajasthan, the mountainous areas of Ladakh (described to me once as “heaven on earth”), the entrance to the Himalayas and then there’s the Holy City, my home in India, Varanasi.

Varanasi is, in my opinion, the most cultured city in India. Where other cities of Varanasi’s size are becoming increasingly less traditional and more westernized, Varanasi is doing it old school. This is because the Holy City is situated on India’s holiest river, the Ganjes. Every year millions of pilgrims come to Varanasi for religious festivals and cleansing. It is an extremely holy place. As a result there is no alcohol, women choose to mostly wear traditional Indian sarees or Punjab suits, cows roam the streets (literally strolling down extremely busy roads, without a care) and most religious traditions are still thriving.

Living in Varanasi for six months, I became very close to several families. One woman who I was particularly close to, Mumta Ji (Ji is an Indian mark of respect) was very interested in Australian culture and we would swap stories about our cultures, she would laugh at my choice of clothing and the fact that I get so excited about elephants, and I would show her photos from home and marvel at how different our cultures in fact are.

As a woman, Mumta Ji lacks many of the freedoms that I am privileged to enjoy in Australia: dating, wearing what ever I like, talking to whom ever I please, deciding where I want to live and who I will marry, drinking alcohol and eating meat to name a few.

Mumta Ji isn’t all that bothered by this, for the most part, she finds my lifestyle a novelty. She is most shocked that I don’t intend to have children until I’m in my late 20s-if at all; this she cannot comprehend.

However, as many differences there are between Mumta’s culture and mine, there are so many similarities. The most important thing that I learned while in India is that people are the same, despite their differences, where ever you go.

Sorry for the paradox, but it’s the simplest way to put it and it must be simply put. Where ever you go, you will find the same office politics, kids who are loud and giggly and shy kids who hide behind their parent’s legs, community gossip, affectionate teasing, the same willingness to help out a stranger, the same laughter, the same terrifying and passionate mothers, the same friendships and the same conflicts and the same

While our cultures differ, our emotions and our connections are the same.

That’s the brilliant thing about India. It’s a whole other world, the sights, smells, tastes and sights are all more intense, everything works in a completely different way, but there’s that same sense of community and it still feels like home.

My Work

By day I’m a uni student, by night, weekend and the very early hours of the morning, I’m a freelance events photographer and videographer.

This is an example of what I do.

In the process of doing what I do, I’ve become better at it, as with everything that people do.

Something I’m not the best at is promoting my work online. I don’t have a large online presence in relation to my events work other than basic adverts on particular websites.

I hope to use my freelance events work as way to practice what I learn in my Networked Media class. It is extremely relevant as far as professional progression of my current occupation and might also help with the development of a career in advertising which I hope to enter into.

But I’m stuck, I don’t know where to start. My interest range is so broad and wedding videography is so distant from both social media and advertising that I’m not really sure how to connect them. That’s something I will need to overcome and I’ll have to generate ideas in order to do so. And soon.

Mardy Online

Exploring and creating content on and about the online world.

Category Archives: Personal