#ShelleeKing – Oz Indie Cinema

David Black shares seven recent interviews he did with some amazing Aussie talent!

Hi everyone. The main purpose of Oz Indie Cinema is to promote our local indie movie industry, but that hasn’t made me shy away from looking at various issues affecting the business. Articles such as the ones I did on extras, crew and gender bias were very popular, very much to my surprise. You, the readers, have determined that this is a niche blog, and I’ve found that articles which touch upon the big Hollywood productions end up going down like a lead balloon. It seems that very few here want to read another story on the stuff that’s been done to death on the big mainstream sites.

Today, I have a serious issue to cover and I hope that it will be of interest to you. It involves unscrupulous journalists who offer to sell interviews to actors who are hungry for the publicity. Some approach Aussie actors because they know that in order to work in the USA that they must have a certain number of recent media outlets covering their work. It’s made Australia a favourite target for these predators.

I first heard about this when reading facebook updates by some of the bigger movie industry bloggers who’d found themselves embroiled in vicious online fights for speaking out against the practice. They were accused of preventing people from making a living. It wasn’t that long afterward that I found myself being approached on various social media platforms by people offering to cover my projects for a fee. Real journalists do not charge for articles. They chase up stories that they feel are news worthy and present them to the public.

I decided that the best way to counter this practice for our local industry was to do the same sorts of articles for upcoming actors for free. I had an account on a blog that I’d almost forgotten about and it was time to put it to good use. It seemed a low risk place to do what I thought were going to be formularised, cheesecake articles – bunged out quickly and of very little value other than vanity for the interviewees.

It seems that I was wrong about the platform and the value of these articles and I’m glad to admit that. In the process of doing these stories, I discovered some amazing Aussie talent. I first thought that I was just interviewing back ground extras of little experience but this certainly wasn’t the case. Some had done far more than I have in the industry and I got to share their amazing experiences.

In the process, I also found that the blog site itself was not just some crappy outlet. The articles published actually did make it to the front page and got quite a good number of views. They’d built a fair sized audience and I was lucky to be able to get a decent amount of views from their hard work.

So here I am, tail between my legs for having at first doubted the actors and the platform, but excited to present to you the first seven fantastic interviews I did with some amazing, upcoming Aussie actors on creators.co .

So …. Here are our magnificent seven!