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Sunday afternoon
Soon I may have internet access in my halls again and at that point the writing will begin again. it’s hard to be inspired in a library. On the positive side I’ve watched up to three new documentaries since last night so I’m wondering whether to look at the origins of french and English cinema.
I had some inspiration whilst attempting to watch Nightmail by Grierson.
Tonight I shall be watching Philibert’s L’empire des Sourd, documentary I recently read about.
I went to see Borat and it’s really amusing, a good excuse to laugh for more than an hour.
Spy-cam wildlife filmmaking
Spy-cam wildlife filmmaking is an interesting discipline. It builds upon the decades of innovation that the documentary film genre has built upon. From the earliest images by the Lumière brothers of the workers at a factory to the development of film editing by Eisenstein and Dziva Vertov demonstrated by “The Man With the Movie Camera to sync sound with the Crystal sound system used by Jean Rouch for Chronique d’un été.
The BBC is seen as the leading example of high quality television programming and this has been the case for decades. The Natural History Unit is responsible for some of the best wildlife documentary films and series and with good reason. They adopt the latest technology, hire crews for months or even years at a time, to capture nature’s spectacle and beauty, and bring it to living rooms around the world.
Sensory: BBC Wildlife Director John Downer & the technology of ‘spy-cam’ filmmaking from Getty Images on Vimeo.
This attention to detail and this dedication to getting the best images has resulted in some of the best looking documentaries around. the Blue Planet Series, the Planet Earth series, Life and others have provided people with what I like to call a video encyclopaedia of the natural world.
The technological innovation that we see in the video above demonstrates how animals and behaviour that we had seen through a tele-lens can now be seen up close and with as natural a behaviour as possible. Almost every book I have read about the documentary genre speaks about capturing life with as little alteration of natural behaviour as possible. This technology is making that wish a more realistic goal.
Swimming Birds
The Planet Earth and Blue Planet documentaries have some amazing footage and some great sights. One of those greats sights is that which starts with birds sitting in the middle of the ocean because the wind is too weak for them to glide. You see the superpod of dolphins and a cluster of those dolphins leave to hunt.
The wind picks up and the birds begin to fly. As they fly we see the dolphins get closer to their quarry. A school of fish. The dolphins bring the fish up to the surface, within diving range of the birds. The birds can go as far down as fifteen meters to get their prey.
You see the dolphins who help the birds get their lunch. Without the dolphins, the birds would have little food.
The dolphins have left and the tuna arrive. They create an artificial seafloor and the birds keep munching and diving for fish.
It’s an amazing sight. There are hundreds of fish and hundreds of birds underwater at the same time. It’s amusing to see how they flap their wings to get down and grab their prey, then point upwards and float back to the surface.
It’s only within the past two months that I learned that birds can swim underwater.
Ducks do it to get to their algae in ice ponds but only whilst the current is not too strong to drown them.
The birds described above do it to get their prey.
Yet another species of birds dive bombs and leaves trails of bubbles behind them.
Ahhh, the things one must watch for dissertation research.
Dirty Gold War screening at the Graduate Institute.
I went to watch Dirty Gold War at the Graduate Institute at lunch time today. The film is interesting because it makes you think about the environmental impact of gold mining. We’re familiar with the stories of gold mines in South Africa. We’re familiar with the stories of the gold rush. We don’t often think of the environmental impact of Gold mining in rain forests in Latin America. This documentary introduces the topic well.
It brings our attention to the fact that when people buy luxury products like gold watches, bracelets and other objects they are buying objects that have no environmental or ethical credentials. It leads us to question when the luxury industries will be accountable to such considerations.
Mobile Phones, laptops, televisions and other devices all contain traces of gold. If that gold is sourced from environmentally unfriendly sources then we are contributing to the destruction of the rainforests and the poisoning of ecosystems. Fairphone and other companies with such goals benefit from such documentaries because we are shown why their goals are so important. It contextualises their mission and their reason for being. It also helps to put pressure on all electronics manufacturers to do more to reduce their impact on the environment.
Dirty Gold is a topic that does not get much attention. As I reach the conclusion of this blog post I find that Dirty gold points to a music album rather than gold mining. We need to raise awareness of this topic. People are wearing wedding wings, luxury products and using electronic devices that are in part for the degradation of the environment. As awareness of these issues grows so companies like Apple, Sony and others should work to ensure a clean product line, from raw material in the ground to the finished product.