Filming & Traveling With Courtney Karedas

Every week, Our Sisters, Our Time features one powerful and inspirational woman as a part of our Woman Crush Wednesday series. This week, staff writer Jasmin Dalton got the chance to chat with an artistic and adventurous women: Courtney Karedas. She’s a freelance producer and travel blogger, currently coordinating an upcoming independent feature film and managing to hop on a plane and hit the road in between. With a little sister of her own, she has a great understanding of sisterhood and what it means to empower other women.

1. What does women empowerment mean to you?

Women empowerment means to me, a group of women who embrace each other, lift each other up, and support each other. In its essence, that's what I think women empowerment is, and I think nowadays we’re getting closer to that goal, but we’re still far away from it. But it's just all of us having unity together, and like wanting to share the same goal.

2. How do you define sisterhood?

I define sisterhood kind of like a bond between women. Sometimes men can’t relate to women in relationships, with men and women, [they] aren’t as strong as two women’s relationships, so it’s kind of like the secret bond and a way of knowing what they’re thinking and what they want, and it’s really hard to explain if you’re not a women. So it’s just like a girl thing like, you just understand what they’re going through and you just get them, and it’s kind of cool. But that’s what I think sisterhood is.

3. What advice do you give to young girls living in this internet age with all that we see on social media?

Well, I have a younger sister, and I love giving her advice, and I always think about giving advice to younger girls. Definitely, number one thing is if you’re in a relationship or you like a guy, never send a picture of you without clothes on. Haha. Don’t do that. And I know that's so like, in this generation, like that's like a thing, like sending nudes and stuff like that, but that’s just, I know it's weird and taboo to talk about but really don’t ever do it, don’t ever do that. Like, save it for in person when you want to have that special moment, don’t ever do it over the phone because you don’t know what's going to happen with that. Also with bullying, I feel like that’s something that’s kind of getting more aggressive because of the internet and the generation that’s going through high school right now. You know, you can’t be quiet, you need to stand up for yourself, and if you can’t stand up for yourself, you need to tell your friends, and your peers because it's not worth living, like a scared life. You can be empowered, and you can find freedom with getting help. You don’t have to be scared or anything like that. And also like, the pressures that you seen online to look a certain way. I know that's a big thing but you have to know that you’re special for the way that you look, and you were created a certain way, and you have to embrace it, and I know that maybe you’re goal might be to lose weight or to fit into a pair of pants that aren’t your size, but in the end, that’s not what’s going to make you happy. Its really not. So, you just need to find out what makes you happy, and live your best life.

4. You’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately, tell me all about it.

So, me and my boyfriend really like to travel. We like to go on road trips. We actually had an epiphany to make a blog, and to make a youtube channel to showcase all of these really cool adventures we go on because we both come from a film background, and we really do make a production out of it, and something that’s been trending over the years are travel videos. And, we started making them when we were in college when travel videos weren't what they’re today. We just kind of did it for fun. We both we’re learning how to edit, how to film, you know he’s a cinematographer. I’m like a producer, sometimes I act, but I don’t know. It was just something that happened to us, and this past year, we traveled a lot. And my birthday came around at the beginning of the summer, he was kind of like, well I was talking about blogging like “Oh, blogging seems like something that would be cool” to like showcase maybe stuff that we do, and he kind of really encouraged it, and enforced it like yeah, like “what if we actually did do this?” What if we made a blog and showcased all of our travel videos and our travel photography, and it kind of just took off from there. We launched it about 3 weeks ago and it's been really fun and I’m really excited to see where it's going to take us.

5. What are some traveling tips?

If you’re interested in doing it, then you should do it. Because you can totally do it, because I’m actually working on a blog post right now about why we travel, and kind of like you can travel too. Sometimes you think “Oh, I don’t have the money!” or “I don’t have the time.” But honestly, it's all excuses, like if you plan it and execute it correctly, you can totally do it. If you live in Southern California and you want to go to Big Sur, you can do that in a day and back. If you only had one day to travel, you totally could. If you designate a weekend to it, you can go all the way to Monterey and back. It's so possible, you just have to put in the time to plan it out, and figure out what out what you want to see, and you can do it. It's totally, totally doable.

6. What are your dreams and aspirations?

Really just trying to make it in the film industry. I love filmmaking. I love producing, and I’m young right now. I’m really just trying to get my foot in the door. But, I’m just trying to do everything I can. Whatever opportunities come my way, I would love to be producing movies 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. That's my passion. And I feel really lucky that I found my passion. And I want to pursue filmmaking for the rest of my life. Now, traveling, I would love to keep doing traveling, keep making traveling videos. It’s kind of like a hobby right now, but if that became a career, and I got paid to travel, that would be a dream and awesome venture I would totally love to do and I could still put my producing and filmmaking craft towards those videos, those travel videos and show people really cool content through the blog and stuff like that.

Courtney is on her way to making her mark in the film and travel industry!

Be sure to keep up with her travel and business endeavors @keekee92 & @indigo_child_blog.