Hey-o, what it do, here’s my first post about my documentary.
I want to make a 10 (perhaps longer) minute documentary on local meat production. I have decided to focus on meat for several reasons. The first being that meat is, and likely will always be, an integral part of the American diet. Since settler times, Americans have consumed vast quantities of beef, pork, and poultry. To illustrate this, lemme throw a few lil’ statistic at y’all: Average meat consumption topped 150 pounds annually by the nineteenth century. The Great Depression years aside, Americans continued eating meat at this level until the 1960s, when consumption increased to more than 200 pounds per person per year. That’s 6-8 ounces of meat each day per person for almost all of American history.
The second reason I want to focus on meat is that I really like enjoy eating it, but I’m also a conflicted carnivore. I am aware of the environmental ramifications of eating meat, and these environmental effects worry me greatly. I plan on talking about these effects in my doc. In addition, I want to talk about the ethics behind eating meat. Is it right to raise animals for the sole purpose of slaughtering them in order to feed us? Is it just natural for us to eat other animals? Are vegans onto something? I dunno, but in the next couple weeks yammo gonna find out! This documentary is as much a personal document of me exploring my meat-heavy diet as it is a documentary about meat production.
The main focus of the doc will be either Stewart’s Meat Market in Yelm, or Oakland Bay Farm in Shelton. By focusing on a small meat farm, I can also dip into another interest of mine: how small businesses maintain, economically, ethically, and quality-wise, in the face of massive competition from larger, wealthier, more visible competitors. In this case, it will be how a small farm maintains in the face of massive agri-businessess that practice industrialized meat production.
Stylistically, the doc will go (hopefully) like this:
Form: An essayistic, direct cinema hybrid.
Visual: Modernist, with a particularly focus on texture and the abstract. Meat is a highly visceral thing, so I want my shooting style to be visceral. Yeah, it’ll probably get gross, but whatever, meat is bloody. I want to use a steadicam for many of my shots, so I hope Media Loan has one (if not, I’ll build that 10 or 15 buck one). Ideally I’d shoot this on a PD-150, but I’ll take whatever 3-chip I can get. Above all, I want this documentary to be visually interesting and visceral; “haptic visuality” is my goal.
Audio: Extensive use of voice-overs, utilizing both me reading my essay, and extracted audio from interviews with the farmers.
Music: Synthesizers! I want to score it with either some outrageous Vangelis-style sweeping synths, or some weird, noisy shit. Both are on completely different ends of the spectrum, both could rule, both could suck. I’ll figure this part out later.
Well, there’s my summary. As far as what I’m doing the next couple days, I will be doing the following:
- Churning out the rough draft of my 2 page proposal narrative
- Continuing my research. Right now, I’m reading two books on the subject of meat: “Putting Meat On the American Table” by Roger Horowitz, and “The Hungry Soul: Eating and Perfecting of Our Nature” by Leon R. Kass, M.D.
- Figuring out when I can visit the farms, and who’ll drive me there
- Hanging outside
Since we’re approaching cookout weather, here’s what’s up:
