DONE! SORT OF!

I must say it feels good to be done with this project and to have finally seen it on the big screen! It was a hectic week of editing, but it worked out. Unfortunately, I'm not really done with this project yet.  Now that all the fun stuff is edited, I now get to make a Tagalog version of the video... My next step is write up all of the English narrations in the video and send them off to be translated into Tagalog so I can add subtitles.  I must say I am a little disappointed that I will not be present at the actual screening of my video, since it will premiere in the Philippines.  After that it will be used as an education tool around the country I guess... It's weird that I won't really know where it will be ending up.  Overall though I am very pleased with how the video has turned out.  I think I hit all the points I wanted to cover and I've been working on this project for almost exactly a year, so it is nice to finally see a finished product.

Rhinolophus philippinensus AKA The Most Kick-Ass Bat in Town

I must say now that it is (almost) finished that this was quite a bit more logistically challenging than I had expected. I had sort of expected that doing the actual editing was the only hard part, but organizing the translations (with the help of Jodi of course) and figuring out the soundtrack was pretty tricky as well.  That being said, the use of the internet has been an invaluable help in making this project, and it would have been nearly impossible to do everything I wanted to do in the time I had without the internet.  Both the translations and the soundtrack were organized without a single face-to-face meeting, which I thought was amazing, but a little strange.

Holy Bat-fork, Batman!

I enjoyed Kristen Bohem's lecture about taking art into the real world.  I feel like I can identify with her in a way because I also sell small trinkets.  I like the idea that one form of art can support another.  In Kristen's case, she does graphic design to help fund her artwork. I've always planned on making fork sculptures on the side of whatever I end up doing.  I want to go into film in some way or another, so maybe selling forks can help me fund that ambition.  Selling forks allowed my to buy my first first camera a few years ago, so I think I'll keep that up.  I am curious to see if I will actually sell any bat-forks at the screening next week...

The artist that I researched is Rupert Murray.  In 2009 he directed a documentary film about overfishing in the worlds oceans called The End of the Line.  It shares a lot of characteristics with my video, in that it has a strong conservation message.  It is structured very much the same way as I plan for mine to be.  It clearly states the threats that humans pose against the fish, but it ends with a hopeful message that encourages the viewer to do their own part in helping to solve a problem.  I plan to do this as well.  One thing that this film has is a narrator, and this is something that I have wanted to avoid from the start.  I don't want my video to have too much of an "outsider" perspective (though it will inevitably have some).  I want the story should be told through the interviews, not an outside narrator.