True’s SXSW Sydney Diary Day 6
Day #6 of True’s SXSW Sydney experience was more focused around expos instead of talks. Below are a couple of highlights from the last few days from the team at True, exclusively for Campaign Brief.
Finance Industry Emergency
Speaker Kane Jackson is an ex-paramedic who co-founded an independent finance company. When he was a paramedic, he realised that many of the people he treated had health issues stemming from financial inequality. In Australia (and NZ), if you’re physically unwell, you have the right to be treated. But it isn’t the same with financial unwellness, something he and his company are working to change.
Horror & Audience: Why We Love Being Terrified
Samantha Jennings, producer of the new horror classic Talk to Me, spoke about taking notes from a production company (A24) that genuinely understood their audience. The studio recommended a certain ringtone in a scene, as it would get a laugh out of the younger audience. Sure enough, in every screening it got that laugh.
Natalie Erika James, director of Relic, spoke about how to deal with feedback as a young creator: “Know when to listen, but know when you know. Other people might be more experienced than me, but no one’s made my film yet.”
Kia Roache-Turner, director of Wyrmwood, said that horror is like the blues. Everyone knows the template, but once you’ve learned it, you can express yourself in all kinds of ways.
How Exploring Space Benefits the Earth
- 1. Joshua Chou is the co-founder of Explor Biologics, which specialises in the development and translation of space technologies to advance human healthcare. For example, microgravity can have similar effects on the body as aging, but on a much faster scale, which helps us better understand aging diseases like osteoporosis. And some medicines have different efficacies in space compared to on Earth.
SXSW Screen: Saltburn
The crowd recoiled at the sight of a character eating a Crunchie bar from the middle out.
Hacking Oppression: The Battle for Human Rights in the Digital Age
A talk from Manal al-Sharif, a women’s rights activist from Saudi Arabia and co-host of the Tech4Evil Podcast. She shared an initiative called Flash Drives for Freedom: they take old USB drives, fill them with movies, books, music, and news, and smuggle them into North Korea. If you have an old USB stick or SD card floating around, consider mailing it in; if not, they accept donations too.1.
