Concerned Citizen

Video

Concerned Citizen: Taylor from Helen Butcher on Vimeo.

Artists' Statement

When it comes to media, community is very important. As community is portrayed in media, media is consumed by the community, so it’s a constant cycle of the two influencing each other. As new filmmakers, it’s our responsibility to portray and showcase communities that inspire service and kindness to the audience. Showing that the small acts we do can be a big deal to others is very important, and whether we do it for a job or just in passing, we need to remember that it doesn’t take much to make other people happy.

Taylor Whitehead is a daughter, friend, college student, and CNA. CNA means Certified Nurse’s Assistant, a job where she goes to people’s houses and help take care of their elders. Cody suggested that Taylor be the subject of our project because she pointed out that it takes a special kind of person to dedicate their life to helping old people. We wanted to portray Taylor as an ordinary young woman, so we tried to be fairly casual about the shoot. This was to emphasize that it doesn't take an extraordinary person to do good things. The emotion and interest comes from solely Taylor herself as she is so animated and happy to talk about her job. This is what sets her apart; she’s dedicated to doing this job not because it’s hard, but because it makes her happy and others happy. The work she describes seems simple, but it’s clear that she is a huge help to the old people.

This week in class we read Human Rights and Culture: From Datasan to Storyland by Arlene Goldbard. A quote we liked from that was “In Storyland, we understand that the resilience that sustains communities in times of crisis is rooted in culture, in the stories of survival and social imagination that inspire pepe to a sense of hope and possibly even in dark times. Sharing our stories as song, drama, dance, in word or image supports resilience by showing people how theirs met similar challenges, survived and prospered.” This supports our idea that it doesn’t take much to help others, and when we show this in the media, we can inspire communities to come together with those small acts. An example of this in the media is Soul Surfer (McNamara), a movie based on a true story about a thirteen year old girl who gets her arm bitten off by a shark. It’s an inspiring to see the community rally around her and give her love and support through the small collective acts of them all. Therefore, when everyone does small and simple acts of service and kindness, the result can be overwhelmingly positive.

In conclusion, it’s important to show service in the media to inspire communities to do good things. Like Taylor, we can choose to do things that make us happy while also helping out others. When we show this in media, it can inspire communities because it shows that when everyone bands together to do good things, amazing and inspiring things can happen.

World Building

In our world, gravity isn’t a constant. Instead, it just sort of wildly fluctuates throughout the day. This idea was somewhat inspired by the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slapstick. In it, sudden, rapid shifts in gravity’s force cause the whole of society to plummet into chaos. When we were pitching ideas, Slapstick immediately came to my mind because of how drastically this one thing changed the world. I thought that this idea could be interpreted in a lot of different, really interesting ways. Our world is a lot less intense than the one described in Slapstick, the whole of society hasn’t collapsed. Instead, people have had to make adjustments to live their day to day lives despite the random shifts in gravity.

We created concept drawings of different ways typical items would be altered in order to function in this world. For example, towns would have domes over them to stop things (including people, and even the air itself) from floating away into space when gravity fluctuates into its weakest levels, or anchored chairs with buckles that allow people to strap themselves in and wait for gravity to return to normal. Another idea we had is a vest that has a controllable mass, that can be increased or decreased depending on the strength of gravity allowing people to still walk around during the fluctuations. All of these ideas would have varying levels of quality, richer people would be able to afford better equipment while the poorer would have to settle for things like strapped down chairs. This would create a very clear distinction between the upper and lower class.

One example from the class that we drew inspiration from was the notice from the film, District-9. This public notice gave us the idea to create our own for our world where gravity is not constant. So we wanted to create a sign that portrays a particular public issue that commonly occurs in our world. We wanted to show how littering is a very eco shattering problem, more than it is in our present world. When people choose to litter in our world, it can be lost into our atmosphere every time our gravity starts to fluctuate. In this world, you are unable to simply pick up litter from the ground, because it floats around the atmosphere, getting in the way and polluting the air. Another issue that this fluctuation in gravity creates is sudden, forceful garbage rain caused by higher levels in gravity makes trash jettison towards the Earth with extreme force.

It was interesting to think of all the implications that such a world demands, from the obvious (the need for mass-changing vests and chairs with “seat belts”) to the more unapparent (like the need for domes so that the atmosphere doesn’t float away, or the litter problem). We tried to imagine what the everyday life of someone living here would be like, and it helped us to come up with more creative ideas. Though we all agreed that living in this world would not be fun, the citizens of it have made it manageable for themselves, and that is what we tried to convey with this assignment.