I could stay in a hostel for 2 weeks and live the life of a homeless person to see get a better insight into the kind of lifestyle they have. I could interveiw some of the people I’m living with whilst I’m there to compare thier life experiences to my brief experience.

I still like the work of Shepard Fairey and would like to incorporate similar imagery into an animated section of the documentary. Ideally, I would like to interveiw a young homeless person and animate thier life. I think this would highlight the fact that the subject is still a child and, hopefully, this will hit an empathetic note with the audience. I think something similar to that in the Shock doctrine by Naomi Klein, a mixture of moving image and graffiti-style stop motion would be a really powerful method for getting such a strong message across. I think the use of animation, much like Persepolis, would make such an intense subject more accessable to a younger audience.

Quite a while ago I saw a Panorama episode called Esther vs the PC brigade, where Esther Rantzen was talking about political correctness gone mad and how this affects the protection of children. In one part of the programme, she used child actors to look as if they were lost in a shopping centre so that Esther could surviel and question those who did and didn’t stop as to why. I think a scene like this in my documentary could be very powerful. I could set up a camera opposite a homeless person in the street and ask different people why they did and didn’t stop to give them money or even make eye contact with them. I think this is quite a risky idea, and I’m not sure how many people would allow me to use their shots if they would look bad in the final piece. However I think it is definatly something worth looking into.

Another possible angle I could take would be to talk to police officers and see what they feel about having to move homeless people on, or what they think about the laws around homelessness.

If  we agree to work together I will put these ideas to Ross and see what we can come up with.

More than anything, this experience has taught me to always be prepared, you could end up in a situation where you could take amazing shots and not have your camera with you. One day we went out on safari and I didnt have my camera charged and missed the whole process of a cheetah kill. As you can imagine I was devistated! I have decided that I must always have my camera ready at hand at all times, so that I can always capture a moment, whether it be still, moving or audio.

Researcher M.L. Hoffman suggests that:

“Guilt is both a cognitive and an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes that he or she has violated a moral standard and is responsible for that violation. A guilty conscience results from thoughts that we have not lived up to our ideal self. “ 

Therefore, when someone such as myself feels guilty for not giving a homeless person some of thier spare change, it is because we know we could have and, probably, should have.

I decided to look into this subject in more detail and in particular to look at different people’s views so I conducted a mini survey. I drafted up a questionnaire and handed it out to 10 people, male and female to see what thier veiws on homelessness were. Here are the statistics:

Do you give money regularly/have you given money on more than 3 occassions to homeless people:

60% said Yes and 40% said no.

Of the 60% of people that said yes, only 1 person said they feel a connection to the person they gave money to, and only 4 felt like the money they gave would help them. The main reason these people gave money was because they felt sorry for the homeless or felt bad for them. One person purely gave money because they were in a good mood.

Of the 40% of people that said no, only 2 people said they felt guilty about it. 3/4 of the participants said that they didn’t feel like it was their responsibility, but thankfully the same amount said they did not feel anger towards homeless people.

The final question asked what could be done to help reduce homelessness to which 70% suggested more shelters/ help for the shelters themselves. 2 people suggested that more should be done to help re-employ them and 1 person suggested they should be ‘shipped to another country’.

This is a really interesting insight into the ideas and preconceptions people have about homeless people, and I feel it is a very powerful topic. A lot of us feel guilty about this topic, but at the same time feel it isn’t our responsibility.

I think I would really like to delve deeper into this topic for my final project to not only find out the facts as to why people have ended up in this situation, but also to educate people as to what we can all do and what is being done.

Shepard, along with other artists, has a campaign called ObeyGiant:

http://obeygiant.com/events/regime-change-starts-at-home-2#more-2812

The idea is to create a constant awareness of these issues within society via graffiti, art and stickers; something that Shepard himself describes as street art in this interveiw:

Looking at his work realy reminds me of the work of Banksy, another graffiti artist, as he not only uses a similar stencil-based approach, but also because of the strong political message behind each and every piece that is made.

Banksy works mainly in Graffiti work, and has remainded an anonymous figure throughout his fame to date.  This is due to the fact he would quite probably be arrested, as he has not only been drawing illegal grafitti, but he has been known to swap paintings in galleries for his own work.

http://www.cesarkuriyama.com/LongGone/LongGone.html

The video’s narrative, about a stuffed toy that comes to life is similar to an animation I made in my first year of university:

One of the main problems I had with moving my stuffed toy about was that when I needed him in positions that gravity wouldn’t allow for I was stuck. So I had to adjust the movements of my animation to suit what gravety allowed! However, Caeser used a technique whereby he attached blue sticks to his stuffed toy and moved him about whilst wearing all black. This could then be easily edited out for the final cut. This is a very simple yet effective technique and if I were to make another animation I would definatly adopt this method.

Another thing I like about Caeser’s video is the lighting. He uses bright, soft lighting to allude to the fact that the video is indeed a dream sequence. I found it added a surreal, blurred edge to the story and it has inspired me to be more attentive towards what lighting I use and what effect it will have on my overall piece. 

Caeser is mainly a photographer, and when I looked at the photo’s from his photgraphy blog some of the photo’s reminded me of the photography of William Eggleston. Both have taken pictures of images of things that we wouldn’t usually look at as beautiful or interesting. Yet the way they have composed the image makes it interesting.

The water image in particular reminds me of a photograph I spontaniously took a few years ago of the lights of the City reflecting off the water of a fountain.

This, to me, shows something doesnt have to be spectacular to create a spectacle, looking at the mundane and obvious can create inspiration too.

I explored the power of women’s role by watching Under the Greenwood Tree. I would like to create a fictional video adaptation of a novel with a sexual theme running through it. The aim is to ‘re-sensitise’ the audience. Sensual scenes would be shot less explicitly than modern films.

Memory:

I also watched an animation called Persepolis, a cartoon style take on an Iranian girl’s memories of her childhood living through the Iranian revolution. I would like to create a similar step-by-step ‘educational’ animation about the Credit crunch. It’s something we will always remember, and is something we are all a bit unsure about. I would like to explore the power the government has had and the media in exploiting our fears.

Spectacle:

My understanding of spectacle is to make a show of yourself, and my initial thought on this is drunken teenagers. My final idea would be to create a documentary about underage drinking and what power/responsibility the media has with regards to advertising alcohol.