Applied: Devi's recordings

Over the weekend Devi sent us a Dropbox folder with the recordings we were interested in after our chat. After we each listened to the recordings the three of us came together to identify ones which we all agreed would be nice to animate, or had a strong climate change/sustainability message. Out of the six that I really liked, Brenda and Rosie were also interested in three or four of them.

The best story that we all liked was a man talking about the experience of farmers whose land and water was being contaminated by chemicals as a result of fracking. This story was exactly what we were looking for from the start, since we started out with fracking as the area of "sustainability" that we were interested in pursuing. Unfortunately this recording was made at a music festival, and try as we might it was impossible to remove the background noise to any usable point without completely distorting the voice.

Another nice tale was from a man, now living in Australia, who was originally from Alabama. He spoke about how his neighbourhood used to get infested with toads who liked to eat the swarms of flies and crickets attracted to the electric lights. On returning home after a 15 year absence he was shocked to see no more toads - which he related to a drastic change in the climate. He also mentioned having worked for a wind-energy company, who found their plans for a farm in California scuppered by Bob Hope's wife who didn't like the look of the turbines and used their connections to have the project binned.

We have agreed that, in order to decide on a story we will each pick one, make storyboards for it, and then reconvene. We can then look at the three storyboards, and decide on which one we want to continue to develop. I picked the toads story, Rosie picked a story about an old lady whose town flooded when she was a child, and Brenda chose the fracking story discussed above. Brenda's challenge is to find some way of making the background noise seem less intrusive.

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We are taking a trip to Knostrop on Thursday, to a chemical processing plant which is used by fracking companies to dispose of their waste water. We plan on getting a few drawings and photographs, which may come in handy if we decide at some point to move our project back to a more fracking based approach. Also on Thursday we will share our storyboards with each other.