Mel Campbell

SAY YEP TO THE SHEP ✨🥑✨

Know your URLs:

copyright dot org dot au is the Australian Copyright Council, which offers info & free legal advice about all things Copyright Act 1968 (Cth)

copyright dot com dot au is the Copyright Agency, which collects licensing fees & redistributes them to the relevant rights holders

Journalists, critics & creative writers can get $$ from:

books whose rights you own (via self-pub or reversion)
chapters you wrote for anthologies & collections
articles you wrote for newspapers, mags & journals

You don't need to list every piece you wrote; focus on the publications you wrote for

Illustrators, photographers, cartoonists & fine artists can get $$ from:

'pay-per-use' payments
resale royalties
books & newspaper & mag articles you illustrated
digital licences to galleries etc
works used in TV/film
copyright fees collected overseas

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Education is the big one, e.g. if your work is used in a textbook or study guide, or in an exam

Media monitoring companies may also use your work in their reports, etc

These payments are for works whose rights you own, not works created as an employee (rights assigned to your employer) or contractor (assigned to your publisher/commissioning client)

Copyright info for artists: visualarts.net.au/media/upload...

For writers:
www.copyright.org.au/browse/book/...

Annual reminder for Australian writers and artists: join the Copyright Agency (it's free!) & register your works by 31 March to receive an annual lump-sum payment for their reuse

Copyright is even more precious as generative AI companies steal creative work!

Separate info below…

It was going on one, two in the morning, and we were shooting what I felt was an important scene for me, when he makes an attempt to be quote-unquote straight, in a suit, and at the end of it he gets emotional and locks himself in the other room. And I felt like, I’m not getting what I want—I’m not happy with it. Mike was happy with it. He called me the next day and said, “I know you weren’t happy with the scene last night. Believe me, we wouldn’t have gone home if I had felt we weren’t getting it.” And then he sort of became my psychiatrist and said, “You find it difficult to be happy, don’t you? You find it difficult to enjoy things.” And I said, “Well, sometimes. Last night was about feeling too tired and not feeling I was reaching what I needed to reach for the scene.” He talked to me then about when he was making, I don’t know whether it was Virginia Woolf or The Graduate. He said, “I didn’t enjoy it for a second. I was worried about so many things.” And then he said, “You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”

The Birdcage opened thirty years ago today, so in its honor, I want to share one of my favorite stories about Mike Nichols that didn't make it into my biography. This is from an interview I did with Nathan Lane.

Actors look so terrible when they get whatever cosmetic procedure (implants, fillers, facelifts) gives them that taut, overstuffed midface

These asshole twerps with no brains or education from DOGE really did use ChatGPT to find NEH grants to terminate ILLEGALLY - ruining hundreds lives and destroying hundreds of the greatest humanities projects and partnerships of our time. I’m overwhelmed with rage and anger all over again.

Christ, I can hear the Formula 1 Grand Prix from my house 5.4km away

Three leisure fishermen wearing t-shirts, shorts, baseball caps and rubber boots pose jubilantly on a pier beside a vast Atlantic bluefin tuna posed to hang so it appears to be standing on its nose. The men only come up to its fins halfway along its body. It’s as broad as two of them side by side. Its dead gaze seems dismayed & embarrassed

Idea for an infographic: scale drawings of humans with the animals we eat as food, to prompt viewers to review their own mental ideas of ‘food size’ cf. ‘animal size’

A chicken looks small next to a human

A tuna looks BLOODY YOOGE

My cat loves tuna, but a tuna could eat him as a SNACC

Glad people are settling on the term "pervert glasses". Bonus points if you also say it while posting a picture of Mark Zuckerberg or call them Mark Zuckerberg's pervert glasses.

I actually bought a whole bag of them because this has happened to me before

Last night somewhere, I lost the 🇵🇸 pin I wear every day. Only noticed it was gone when I got home

I hope someone finds it, picks it up, and remembers that PaIestine will be free

I’m sitting in my car, unable to summon the will to drive home, when I was startled by a guy walking up to my window

He looked just as aghast as me

Then he walked away & got into a car two spaces over, the same shape & colour as mine

Hahaha, imagine him thinking a stranger was sitting in his car

We're all based in Melbourne so we're keeping it local for now. Our plan was to roll it out once it's more established & we've seen how it works in practice

But hey, it's a grassroots movt & anyone who's keen to establish AFZs in their location can email to find out more

This project is still in its really early stages & is looking for a volunteer campaign coordinator who can spend around a day a week to build its momentum and keep it strategically focused

If you're interested, email afz-naarm@protonmail.com

Ultimately, AFZ Naarm wants to build a horizontal network of Melbourne arts workers, venues & punters who champion ~each other~ so we THRIVE by our values!

We want to strengthen our local culture scene so it depends less on companies, govts & NGOs that support & profit from apartheid

Artists, producers, programmers & performers: support this project by talking about AFZ in your communities:

Make a social-media video about how AFZ can help align your values with your work

Mention the project in your eDMs!

Plan your next show or event at a venue that commits to become an AFZ!

We want to make it super easy for venues to join the network, so we're starting with a low-hanging pledge: phasing out Coca-Cola products from sale at the venue

Venues can do this at their own pace, & AFZ has lists of ethical alternative suppliers

The key thing is committing to ethical change

If you work at or with an arts & culture venue in Naarm/Melbourne (e.g. a gallery, studio, performance/event space, festival) that has BDS-friendly values, tell the owner/manager about the AFZ project!

You could even offer to sit down with them to fill out the EOI form…

Apartheid Free Zone

Excited to share a project I've been involved in: bringing the global Apartheid Free Zone movement to Naarm/Melbourne!

Punters: look for the AFZ sticker to spend your time & money in cultural venues that commit to boycott & divest from lsraeI

Artists/venues: join a mutually supportive community!

LibbyRose – actually not too bad

I have a weakness for Extremely Catholic Names – those are all on my private list!

I'll be happy to take them up on that and access Netflix shows on the high seas

This awful film is on Stan now

Ooh, relevant to my interests! TikTok has decided to show me loads of second-hand shopping videos. Just this morning I was musing how everyone gets so stoked by completely different styles & types of merch that I would never buy; there truly is room for everyone in the ecosystem

Congratulations! What’s the job?

Pathetic that they keep running this line. It insults every Australian who makes it clear that AUKUS is the thing we do not want