Felicity Blake is a documentary filmmaker and transmedia creator. After graduating from UNSW with a bachelor’s degree in film, she spent several years working in talent management and feature film development before transitioning into documentary production. Felicity likes a challenge, so she has consulted for the Libyan tourism industry, shot the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution demonstrations in Tehran, AD’d “The Burning Season” in a blazing jungle, and filmed in the world’s biggest UNHCR refugee camp during a cholera outbreak. To date, she has worked on a variety of TV programs and cinema documentaries, with experience in 3D, multiplatform delivery, animation, and new media. Felicity has provided stringer footage of Iran to ABC News, been an expert interviewee on “The 7:30 Report”, and is on the organising team of Supanova (Australia’s premier pop culture expo), where, over the years, she has hosted dozens of famous spacecraft pilots, aliens, hobbits, robots, and vampires… and one Wookiee.

1. What were some of the most valuable lessons you learned at film school?

That filmmakers require a combination of vocational disciplines and technical skills (understanding and implementing procedures, equipment and software), as well as contextual knowledge (an appreciation of the medium’s history and canon both liberates us from repeating the past and inspires us to create new work), and untamable creative courage and individuality.

2. Tell us about some of the your current and recent projects?

GUILDENSTERN: One must think of the future.

ROSENCRANTZ: It’s the normal thing.

GUILDENSTERN: To have one. One is, after all, having it all the time. Now … and now … and now…

ROSENCRANTZ:  It could go on for ever. Well, not for ever, I suppose. (Pause.) Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?

GUILDENSTERN: No.

Upcoming projects (that I can talk about):

‘The Sound of Sunshine’, a documentary about synesthesia hosted by Police Academy’s “man of a thousand sound effects”, Michael Winslow.

The Periodic Table of Awesome, a new web-TV series made BY geeks, FOR geeks, bringing you the best of geek from week to week.

3. Given unlimited funds, what project would you embark on?

My international documentary series (in development) which involves children, music and peace.

4. Tell about the ‘at home’ Felicity Blake?

My natural habitat is listening to Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” whilst on a plane en route between somewhere obscure and uncomfortable where the people are renowned for their hostility but usually end up giving me presents, and a divey old-man/locals bar on New York’s Upper West Side where they play jazz on Sundays and I have my own coffee cup.

5. What would you liked to have achieved in ten years?

See question 3. Also, by that time I would like my Somalian refugee friend Abdikadir (‘Like’ his page on Facebook!) and his family to have been able to come to live somewhere safe like Australia. I hope to feel that I’ve lived by humanitarian and conscientiously mindful principles and encouraged others to do the same.

Delighted to say that my interview is up at OMG Squee. Find out who brings out my inner fan girl, and a little more about my Glitter Rose collection. Many thanks to Min Dean and Deanne Sheldon-Collins for having me to visit.

This is for Rena, and because I found it SO amusing. Straight from the Stanford Uni site:

Canadian cowboys appeared very similar to the cowhands across the border in the United States. A broad-brimmed hat for shelter from sun and rain, snug jeans, and high-heeled boots were standard garb. Although unpolished by the urban standards of Montreal or Quebec, Alberta cowboys could likely read and write. . . .

Ranch hands in Canada stand alone among the cowboys of the Americas in having very little negative imagery associate with them. In fact, Canadians go to considerable pains to distinguish their ”civilized” and cultured West from the violent, rough-and-tumble frontier to their south. . . . Historian L.G. Thomas noted of the not-so-wild Canadian West that ”the body is American but the spirit is English.”

Nineteenth-century sources recorded considerable differences in cowboy country north and south of the Forty-ninth Parallel. . . . The Calgary Herald in 1884 contrasted the cowboys of Canada and the United States. ”The rough and festive cowboy of Texas and Oregon has no counterpart here. Two or three beardless lads wear jingling spurs and ridiculous revolvers and walk with a slouch, [but] the genuine Alberta cowboy is a gentleman.”

Source: Slatta, Richard. Cowboys of the Americas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 51.