This week we worked on developing our ideas through means of discussion and presentation. The transcript of my presentation is as followed:

I saw a documentary on Short of the Week about The Dogist, who is a guy that runs an Instagram account dedicated to photographing Dogs in New York – like the humans of New York, but for dogs. I was trying to watch this documentary but my dog was going crazy because every time the Dogist took a photo, because he would squeeze and squeaky toy to get the dogs attention. By the end of the six-minute film, my dog was practically drooling over my computer, trying to get the squeaky toy she was adamant I had hidden in my computer. This got me thinking about her, and why I am so lucky to have her as my pal. My dogs name is Halle and we were her second ‘free to a good’ home.

Such arose the topic of investigating the circumstances of displaced dogs. I think that it is hard to get comprehensive performance from a dog itself, but it is easy to evoke emotion from people talking about their dogs. In particular I think that it would be interesting to explore the situations that people find themselves in which result having to give away their dogs ‘free to a good home’. This could obviously go down the conventional route of looking at RSPCA displaced animals. However when my family were initially looking for dogs I remember seeing lots of advertisements on gumtree under this phrase ‘free to a good home’ for pups that could no longer be cared for. I think that reaching out on this platform would give me a wide range of subjects and different situation.

On top of this, I am still in contact with my dog Halle’s previous owners, and I think that Halle is a good example of how a new home can be a positive thing. She was previously owned by a man who moved interstate, leaving her with his mum. After a while the mother found she was unable to care for Halle, and through a mutual connections she found her way home, to us. The man who had formerly owned her was a bit upset when she was given to us, though after a few months we wrote him a letter conveying how grateful we are for her and how at home we felt together. If I was to interview people in this transitional period of giving up their dogs, hopefully I would be able to induce upon them a similar sense of reassurance, and perhaps a visual memory of their pals.

There was an interactive film on short of the week called soldierbrother, where a filmmakersister narrated her experience of having a brother join the army. I can relate as my elder brother did the same when he was eighteen. Many major situations in my life have been riddled by distance. I feel like an invisible space is created when someone moves away. This area is filled with confusion of coming to terms with the fact that someone who has been in your life everyday is no longer there, that they are still alive and that their everyday now happens somewhere else. Perhaps one of the hardest parts of this invisible space that you don’t know really know if it exists. It is hard to imagine someone’s everyday that isn’t your own. I think that it would be interesting to look at subjects of distance. People who have major figures in there live that have not passed away but passed beyond their physical environment.

Soldierbrother used audio as its primary means of information and I think that similar techniques would be interesting to explore. This is something that I would need to develop further, but for example I could look at my mum and my brother and have only audio of him, with only visuals of her. In terms of other possible people explore, even just in my house everyone has someone who lives in another space. My dad has his mum is Western Australia. We have a Japanese student living with us who has moved away from everyone she knows. Most people are subjects of distance.

The class blog last week had a link to a reading about community, which linked itself closely to a sense of belonging, the denunciation of exclusion and act of inclusion. One of the definitions listed itself as a group of people who share particular circumstances such as race. My dad was born in Burma, and moved to Australia when he was seventeen. Like many Burmese migrants at the time, he moved to Perth, where a reasonable community established itself in the northern suburbs. We moved to Melbourne when I was young, and by then dad was completely assimilated in the Australian life-style, so fluent in English that I often completely forgot it wasn’t his first language. We went back to Burma as a family a few years ago and where all astonished by dads Burmese lingual skills that he neglected in Australia.

My mum has recently been to a few meetings with an organisation that teaches language skills to new migrants and refugees. Mum is a teacher who specialises in English and her and dad are interested in teaming up to assist the increasing number of Burmese people new to Australia. Burmese culture is something that is relatively unknown in Australia but obviously close to home for me. In particular the current persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma has meant an influx of refugees silenced by their own home nation, who now find themselves in a country where they don’t speak the language, again leaving them voiceless. Organisations that teach English skills are so vital and I think that it would be good to create a film that gives voice to a group of people as they are learning the own voice in a new country.

It was good getting feedback and reassurance from our peers. I am not strung up on one single idea at the moment and these are all things that I think could and should be developed further.