Tony Black Dog Ride from ApostrophePong on Vimeo.

I officially met Tony Hollingsworth at the previous Sydney Social Innovation BarCamp after ran onto each other at Cupcake Camp Sydney in 2009. I shared my own experience of depression in a session on mental illness and later sent him a link to my film, Memory of You | Reflection of Me. When he announced that he was going to have a fundraising and awareness-raising event, Black Dog Ride, I certainly was interested to get involved but was not able to join the convoy. So I put my hands up to edit his footage in the trip from Sydney to in the centre of the continent in Alice Spring them around up to Queensland and back to Sydney in 16 days.

I put my hands up to edit Tony’s videos he had taken in the journey, to show it in his session at the latest Social Innovation Sydney. I got a bunch of his footage and photos and some of them were publish on his blog but had no idea what I was going to with them yet. My aim was to summarise his 16-day riding into a comprehensive video.

The rough approach I made to this work:

• Sort the media there were taken from both a DSLR camera and a mobile phone Line them up chronologically. With the time frame, unfortunately, I had to exclude the photos in this video.
• Select good shots on each clip to review it later. At this stage, an idea what I could with it started to form. It was decided to go with a music clip in a rough 16-mm, easy-rider-esque style.
• Pick a music licensed in Creative Commons. That gave me a framework for the visual. Luckily, I found The Thunder That You Are by Comma the perfect fit for the work.
• Cut down the 22 minutes of the first selection into 4.30 minutes of film roughly synced with the music and choose a snippet of Angry Anderson’s speech in Alice Spring as the hi-light. An extra rule was to keep all the footage in chronological order.
• Roughly top and tail the video. Then the arduous tasks of exporting and compressing.

In Australia, suicide rate is higher than the death from road accident, ever more in the remote outback areas. Having the first hand of experience of depression and anxiety, I find that support is an essential part for a person with the illness to get through it and discover their own strength again. In men, it is even harder to admit it, let alone talk about it. Having bikers, who have their own stories about depression, riding across Australia to let the people know that they are not alone and it is ok to seek supports, which are available in many organisations in Australia, is not just blokes are having a fun time on the road. And I am glad to edit this video and enjoy the ride even I was not there.

Thanks to Tony Hollingsworth for letting me access to his videos, Stilgherrian for helping us transfer the chunk of data, Comma for releasing their wonderful music in Creative Commons and, most of all, all the people that made Black Dog Ride happened.