Ok, so I have an idea. An idea about how a short film could be made collaboratively to address a real life problem.
The following is a true story.
One day, over a year ago, a family came over to my house to eat dinner. With them was a young African man, who had been adopted by the family so that he could live in the United States and attend college. We all sat around the table talking, and I found this kid to be interesting, so we began a conversation.
I asked him about his village, his life in rural Africa, and what it was like to live there day to day. Much of it was what you would expect, but during the conversation he said something that caught my attention. After that, the entire conversation revolved around an exploration of that single sentence.
The sentence was "but one day, an entire pack of the hyenas came into the town, and they killed a whole crowd of people at once, and that time, it was in the newspaper"
Once he said that, I had follow up questions. Lots of them. We talked for over an hour, and he explained to me that hyena attacks on people as they went about daily life in town were not uncommon. Apparently there were not too many newspapers either.
My first question "are you saying that sometimes a wild animal kills a person in the middle of one of your cities, and it doesn't make the newspaper?"
Answer "yes, this happens often, there are many hyenas"
My second question. "I would think that people getting eaten alive in town would quickly become a high priority item, do authorities do anything to stop this?"
Answer "the attitude is that this is just what life is like, and if someone dies, then that was going to happen anyway, we don't try anything to stop it, such is life"
I said "In the US, if a single child was killed by an animal in a city, it would be in every newspaper across the country, and every effort would be made to make sure it never happened again."
He said "people there don't think that way"
I don't have an exact transcript from memory, but that was the abridged gist of the conversation.
This talk left a lasting impression on me, and I thought about it for some time. My thinking was this. What if an initiative was developed, to supply these locations with self powering speaker towers, driven by battery installations recharged by wind and solar. Research could be conducted by universities or experts, to find a type of sound that repelled the Hyenas. A type of dog whistle, inaudible to humans, or perhaps the sound of natural predators, such as playback of lion roars,
I'd like to propose the idea of a collaborative filmmaking project, wherein a film is created for the purpose of spreading this idea to relevant parties, the researchers, funding groups, etc. A film that demonstrated the problem and it's reality, outlined possible solutions, and called for public action to provide the relatively small amount of assistance necessary to install these audio deterrent towers in remote cities and villages.
When the kid told me that children were being eaten alive in the streets of their home towns, and no one was even bothering to tell anyone about it, it bothered me. This seems like a small enough goal that simply illustrating the problem in a concise way, and then sending that video to the right groups of people might be able to initiate some small action, like sending a few PA speakers and solar panels out to places where they could save lives.
Being eaten alive by hyenas is a pretty bad way to go. Someone should do something about this. I find it difficult to understand how this is still happening in a time where people are making 200k a day posting joke videos on YouTube.
Might be a cool side project for some of us on the forum, to put together a script, film such an information video, and send it out to appropriate groups. If a half dozen of us collaborated on this, we could probably get it done.
The following is a true story.
One day, over a year ago, a family came over to my house to eat dinner. With them was a young African man, who had been adopted by the family so that he could live in the United States and attend college. We all sat around the table talking, and I found this kid to be interesting, so we began a conversation.
I asked him about his village, his life in rural Africa, and what it was like to live there day to day. Much of it was what you would expect, but during the conversation he said something that caught my attention. After that, the entire conversation revolved around an exploration of that single sentence.
The sentence was "but one day, an entire pack of the hyenas came into the town, and they killed a whole crowd of people at once, and that time, it was in the newspaper"
Once he said that, I had follow up questions. Lots of them. We talked for over an hour, and he explained to me that hyena attacks on people as they went about daily life in town were not uncommon. Apparently there were not too many newspapers either.
My first question "are you saying that sometimes a wild animal kills a person in the middle of one of your cities, and it doesn't make the newspaper?"
Answer "yes, this happens often, there are many hyenas"
My second question. "I would think that people getting eaten alive in town would quickly become a high priority item, do authorities do anything to stop this?"
Answer "the attitude is that this is just what life is like, and if someone dies, then that was going to happen anyway, we don't try anything to stop it, such is life"
I said "In the US, if a single child was killed by an animal in a city, it would be in every newspaper across the country, and every effort would be made to make sure it never happened again."
He said "people there don't think that way"
I don't have an exact transcript from memory, but that was the abridged gist of the conversation.
This talk left a lasting impression on me, and I thought about it for some time. My thinking was this. What if an initiative was developed, to supply these locations with self powering speaker towers, driven by battery installations recharged by wind and solar. Research could be conducted by universities or experts, to find a type of sound that repelled the Hyenas. A type of dog whistle, inaudible to humans, or perhaps the sound of natural predators, such as playback of lion roars,
I'd like to propose the idea of a collaborative filmmaking project, wherein a film is created for the purpose of spreading this idea to relevant parties, the researchers, funding groups, etc. A film that demonstrated the problem and it's reality, outlined possible solutions, and called for public action to provide the relatively small amount of assistance necessary to install these audio deterrent towers in remote cities and villages.
When the kid told me that children were being eaten alive in the streets of their home towns, and no one was even bothering to tell anyone about it, it bothered me. This seems like a small enough goal that simply illustrating the problem in a concise way, and then sending that video to the right groups of people might be able to initiate some small action, like sending a few PA speakers and solar panels out to places where they could save lives.
Being eaten alive by hyenas is a pretty bad way to go. Someone should do something about this. I find it difficult to understand how this is still happening in a time where people are making 200k a day posting joke videos on YouTube.
Might be a cool side project for some of us on the forum, to put together a script, film such an information video, and send it out to appropriate groups. If a half dozen of us collaborated on this, we could probably get it done.
