Live Cattle Export to Indonesia

For many years now I have had a strong interest in animal welfare. Over that time I have watched countless undercover videos of animal cruelty filmed by activists, done school projects about animal welfare, joined countless online protest groups, written angry e-mails to people in Government etc. I would like to one day become much more involved with animal activism, attending protests and the like. When I heard yesterday that the whole country was reeling from this Four Corners investigation I just had to watch it as I generally try to stay up to date with everything happening in the world of animal welfare.

Now I must admit somewhat sadly that after all these years of watching and reading incidents of gross animal cruelty I have become quite hardened to it all. That’s not to say it still doesn’t affect me at all because it does, I still get enraged when I see any act of cruelty but after so many years of exposing myself to it so often I find that very few things shock me anymore. For this reason I felt that I would be fine watching this show, I wanted the information and the facts of what is really going on so last night I stayed up late to watch the repeat of Four Corners. The idea that I would not be shocked by this was grossly wrong, as what I experienced last night was one of the most horrific things I have ever faced.

I knew it would be bad, usually these stories don’t effect a whole country so quickly but the reaction I have been hearing all of the TV, radio and newspaper told me I was in for the worst. Throughout the 40 minutes or so of watching this story I had used up so many tissues from crying that I had to go into the bathroom and grab a toilet roll to use. I was physically shaking with anger and by the end I had what could only be described as a migraine from feeling so much rage and crying so much at the same time. Basically, watching this story really took it out of me in more ways than I can describe. The footage shown was far worse than I could have imagined in my worst nightmares. And the fact that my own countries meat industry supports it is one of the most shocking parts.

Lyn White of the foundation ‘Animals Australia’ is a woman who I admire greatly and I have been following her work for years, but last night I was reminded just how strong the human spirit can be when trying to defend those who can’t defend themselves. White and her team actually travelled around Indonesia, entering dozens of these terrible abattoirs and filming the footage for us all to see. If I thought the footage was hard enough to watch on TV I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for White and her team, standing right there amongst it all. At one stage they showed footage of them leaving one of the abattoirs desperately trying to clean all the blood of themselves before going onto the next one.

To me these people are true heroes of planet earth. What they would have had to go through to get this footage is so horrible that I can hardly imagine it, but what they did has had such a powerful and strong effect. Over the years I have been asked many times why I watch so much animal cruelty footage, how can I put myself through that? To me it’s simple, the reason most animal cruelty acts are covered up or ignored in this day and ages is because people simply don’t know about it or like to turn a blind eye. Most people live in a sort of happy bliss thinking their meat comes from happy healthy animals who felt no pain, or their eggs always come from perfectly healthy chickens out on some lovely farm. People can continue living in these ignorant little bubbles their whole lives until real life footage is thrown right in front of them, that’s the only time we see change.

Another reason I watch it is because this footage deserves to be seen. I greatly admire any animal activist who goes out of their way and into some of the most terrible places on Earth to film and photograph these horrific events. This barbaric animal slaughter and torture has been happening in Indonesia for over 18 years with millions of Australian cattle, but only now with all this raw footage provided by Lyn and her team are people finally taking action.

If anything positive has come out of this it’s the reaction that has come from this story. In just one day over 85,000 people have signed an online petition to put a total ban on live export which is a very impressive number. People have been calling up radio shows in tears about it, it’s been all over the news and the internet. This type of outrage on such a large scale proves to me that the general Australian public are not willing to tolerate such gross animal cruelty under our countries name and it shows that they care. Such compassion towards animals on a large scale like this is always a positive thing.

In the end this issue just like basically all other animal welfare issues will unfortunately come down to money. Time and time again money is put on a higher pedestal than the lives of millions of creatures who can feel pain and fear just as much as us. If you suggest banning live export all over the country straight away the industries are jumping to the same old song and crying “what about the money?”. Sure it may be a billion dollar industry but is it worth the suffering? The general Australian public seems to think not. 


-Sophie

thoughts of a film student: Females + the Film Industry

I just had to re-blog this post from the blog of my very good-friend Monique and I encourage you all to read it. It's an interesting insight into the fact that film is one of the last few industries where equality between the genders is still very unbalanced and in favour of men. Female directors are noticeably outnumbered by men, and not just by a little bit but by a ratio that is outstandingly large in this day and age. This is something that I personally, as well as countless other people would like to see change in the near future. Although I am aware that in saying that I am probably holding my hopes too high.  

thoughts of a film student: Females + the Film Industry: "It was probably going to happen eventually and writing about Jane Campion got me thinking about women in the film industry, so here’s my ran..."

2011 St Kilda Film Festival

A friend of mine who is a film student recently got two free tickets to opening night of the St Kilda Film festival. I was lucky enough to be invited along so last night, just like many other avid film fans we braved the extremely cold weather and rain to make our way to the Palais Theatre. Now I’ll admit, I’d never even heard of this short-film festival before but I’m not one to turn down anything to do with my love of film. Needless to say I quickly jumped on the opportunity to go as fast as I could.

The Palais Theatre really is a beautiful venue and definitely one of Melbourne’s finest. We arrived to see large crowds of cold movie film fans huddled outside as the Palais seemed to look even more magnificent shrouded in rain.

Six short films were shown that night and I was very impressed overall with each one although I did have a few stand-outs. I’m going to write a quick summary of my thoughts regarding each film.

There may be some minor spoilers.

Pop

Director: TOBIA ANDERSSON

Pop is a film that had really outstanding cinematography and direction. It looked beautiful from the opening second to the closing moments but I must admit that the story just didn’t grab me. As someone who greatly dislikes both hunting and chewing gum I found some parts of this film more frustrating than anything. Although I can appreciate and really enjoyed the fantastic way in which the father/ son relationship was developed without any dialogue at all.

Suburbia

Director:  ANTONIO OREÑA-BARLIN

This was one of the stand-out films for me. The sound editing was especially strong in this one and helped to create an extremely thick, eerie atmosphere throughout the whole film. The Palais Theatre was packed and throughout this whole film hardly anyone even breathed, the tension was strong which to me is one of the best signs of a good filmmaker. This film was powerful and very creepy all the way through and I enjoyed watching the audience reactions to some parts as much as I was enthralled with the actual short.

A Lost and Found Box of Human Sensation

Director: STEFAN LEUCHTENBERG

Even though this film tackled a very dark plot I found it very fun to watch all the way through. The beautiful Tim Burton-style imagery and animation worked well here and was at times outlandish while still remaining relevant to the story. I found that the music in this film is really part of what made is so memorable for me. While not being a musical by any means there was the odd song mixed in with the story which added to the overall quirky feel of this film. A lot of the designs, the robots etc felt really familiar to me here as this type of Burton steampunk style is appearing everywhere now, especially in animation. Even though it’s being used a lot I still found it quite effective here so it didn’t bother me.

Bee Sting

Director: HEATH DAVIS

I did enjoy this one but it just felt way too familiar to me. I think I have seen this exact same plot told several times before, whether in TV, film or something else. What saved this film for me was the brilliant acting and the directing. There were a lot of little funny moments throughout but in the end this story for me has just been done too many times before and I couldn’t really connect with it.

Dan Sultan – Old Fitzroy

Director: RHYS GRAHAM, NATASHA GADD

I haven’t listened to much of Dan Sultans music before and I really ended up enjoying this song. I liked the idea for this music video, clean and simple yet it never really felt boring or too repetitive. While this was about Fitzroy specifically I felt like it really captured the feel of all of Melbourne.

Bear

Director: NASH EDGERTON

This film really was a wonderful way to end the night. I hadn’t even read the plot for this so I had no idea where it was going from the beginning, but I found myself being constantly surprised again and again and laughing out loud many times. I found that the very end was quite predictable, but that fact that I never knew where the film was heading up until that point kind of made up for it. The acting was great in Bear and I think the pacing really helped to make it as funny as it was. This film was in some ways quite dark humour but so laugh out loud funny at the same time. This one definitely makes me want to check out other work by this director.

~

Overall I loved my night at the St Kilda Film Festival and I wish I could have seen more than only 6 films. I would really like to keep attending this event each year in the future as it really is a great showcase of local and even some international talent. 

Spider Sculpture – Part One

In my sculpture class at the moment we are required to create a piece using only found objects. This means using anything we find around the house, or even just things we find laying around on the streets or out in nature. One of the main rules we have to follow is that we can’t go out and specifically buy objects with a particular design in mind, we just have to utilize what we can find.

For mine I have decided to include another one of my hobbies, which is archery. Over the years of being in an archery club I have gone through many sets of arrows and have at least two old sets I no longer use. My teacher loved the idea of incorporating the old arrows into my piece or even making the main sculpture just out of arrows. After a while I decided that what I want to do is create spiders. I haven’t decided yet whether I will create one large or a series of smaller spiders with them. I am still working on the planning and all the details but that is where I am heading with this project now.

Above are a couple of photos from my art journal with a few quick sketches of possible spider ideas and a couple of print-outs of two massive spider sculptures by Louise Bourgeois. While I admire her work greatly and have been inspired by her spiders I see myself moving in another direction. While her spiders have quite an organic feel to them created by the curved and free-flowing legs I would like mine to have a more stiff, solid and almost robotic look to them. The straight-edged nature of the arrow is bound to help me with this.

At the moment I am still planning how exactly I am going to do this, and whether my spiders will have colour, whether they will have bodies or just legs and whether they will have the traditional 8 legs or maybe more or less for a more unearthly feel. I will post an update on these spiders when they are ‘hopefully’ completed.

Below is a photo of the two sets or arrows I will be using for this piece. 

Game Review #1 - Batman Arkham Asylum

8.5/10

Batman: Arkham Asylum is the first Batman video game that I have ever played. My experience with gaming is that usually when games are based off films or comics they are often subpar to their original gaming counterparts. Arkham Asylum however offered me a truly exciting gaming experience that I was hooked on from the very first cutscene. 

The story of this game is just as good, if not better than many Batman films I have seen, and with just the right amount of cutscenes throughout the single player gameplay you do almost feel as if you are watching part of a Batman film. The setting of this game is of course the mental hospital/prison of Gotham itself which is Arkham Asylum. This is a setting that can be both endearing and frightening throughout the game and is often brought to life by the games fantastic use of sound. A lot of detail was put into the sound design for this game and it was worth it, the sound effects are sometimes eerie and add layers of atmosphere to certain areas. An example of this is one part of the game where Batman is walking down a corridor and a woman's voice is heard reading out notices on the loudspeaker, only for her voice to become distorted and slowly turn into Joker- controlled laughter. 

The gameplay is quite easy to pick up on after the very unique opening level/ tutorial and remains easy to use throughout the game. The fighting is especially easy to pick up on, although it can be hard when trying to take out attackers in stealth. The detective mode in the game was highly addictive and I often found myself using it even when there weren't any enemies near. Throughout the game Batman has to try and decode a series of riddles left around Arkham by The Riddler. Some of these are as easy as just searching down question mark shaped trophies, but others are a lot harder. I had a lot of difficulty figuring out many of the riddles that were in certain areas because I really didn't figure out how to actually solve them until I was close to finishing the game. I really think it should have been explained more clearly at the start how were supposed to solve the riddles. 

Also, as far as ways that the game could be improved I also believe that it would benefit from having a small on-screen map. I often got frustrated having to click 'select' every few seconds to see if I was going in the right direction as it was very time consuming when you had places to be. 

Overall though this was a fantastic game and the positives far outweigh the negatives. With all the extra riddles and the challenges for Batman to tackle then this is a game that you can really continue to play for a long time, and one which I believe has a very high replay value.

Introduction

I have been meaning to start a blog for some time now so I’ve finally decided to ignore the eternal state of procrastination I usually live in and do it. This blog will be mainly an art blog, as I am currently a full-time art course. I will also most likely use this blog from time to time to ramble on about my other obsessions in life, mainly film, television, video games and animals. 

-Sophie