For my documentary source, I will ruminate on ideas like investigating artworks by the incarcerated, though it seems that this topic has been thoroughly covered by the ABC and SBS of late, plus, I may have expended my last social privilege to call on a key scholarly contact of a community based organisation that specialises in seminal programs like this one.
So, maybe not.
In a moment of indecision, insecurity and mild intoxication, I will look away from this idea and turn my gaze toward the patio where chirping flying rats mill around in their scheming feathered pooping coterie and then I will wonder… I will wonder if I could produce a documentary centred around these nano-transients.
It could work.
I’ll quickly realise that this idea sucks and that maybe I would be better off upping the ante to investigate the great shearwater birds of Phillip Island and see if they have an axe to grind, or a sad story about human pollution… a plight to reveal of sorts. My Dad will exclaim down the phone that “they DO have a plight!” He’ll continue, “You could produce an engaging documentary about these majestic birds… they have a plight, and it is that they have to fly several thousand kilometres each year to migrate” he’d say. To this I will reminded my father that that’s not a plight as such, it’s just what they do. I will also remind him that some Facebook comments are better off confined to Messenger than to the timeline feed but I digress.
These ideas will come as fast as they will go due to blowouts not dissimilar to the latter… they will resemble a Formula One pitstop… Pitstop? PITSTOP?! BINGO!!! Phillip Island has one of those things, a bogan’s merry-go-round… or a race track for petrol driven tin boxes steered by tin men with tin heads.
I will then remember the birds, then I will begin to imagine the 2 forces coming together in one huge mismatched bio-mechanical contest of the fittest and the fastest… like the turtle and the hare, ‘cept… the turtle has a McLaren 10 cylinder engine under its shell?
No, too difficult to report on let alone orchestrate.
I will finally conclude this seemingly discursive tangential rant with more questions than I could answer in one blog… who to interview? how to approach a documentary production? Can I give in to a topic’s shifting unpredictable tectonic transience?
We’ll see. Bring on the 3rd semester!
Great shearwater – Photograph by Patrick Coin 2007