I have been struggling somewhat with the idea of my first blog post. It’s not that I’m afraid of it in any way; I’ve just been struggling with what to say. I thought I would have a look around some of my peers blogs for inspiration when I started thinking about how difficult I find it to "get inspiration" from others creations. I tend to find myself wanting to improve or alter the original idea in a way I believe to be better, but although I had the inspiration to make the alterations, I don’t think you would call that true inspiration.
So instead I find myself thinking maybe I should explain a bit about myself, as I cant of accidentally taken anyone’s ideas in the creation of the person I am. But where do you start? "Hi I’m Stephen and I’m a student" doesn’t seem to really cover my entire psyche and being, and it certainly doesn’t make me easy to compare to others.
So then I tried to flip it on its head, and I wondered, rather than try to describe myself as an individual, why don’t I try and describe myself as part of a collective, the human race. Which made me think of a video that over the last 9 or 10 months I must have watched dozens of time.
I’ll talk about the video in a moment, but if you have watched it (which I hope you have) I would hope you can see where I come from when I say it boggles the mind. 7 Billion people, I can’t even begin to comprehend that. I worked as an announcer at a football stadium for a short time last year and after we had 2000+ people in the stands I started to lose any sense of the fact that they were individual people, rather than a huge sprawling behemoth, never mind 7 billion!
But when I first saw this video, I thought about lots of things like life and death; whether I will add to the population by having kids, whether ill live to see the 10 billion mark, but more than anything I thought about what I could do to help. What could I do to change the world and make it that bit better for even 1 person out of the 7 billion of us. I hope I do get the chance to make a difference in the world, and I hope it’s through film.
The video itself is fantastic in my opinion. It jumps straight in with no warning and starts spewing facts at you. If I were to describe this video without you having watched it I’m sure "It’s a 3 minute video full of facts about the human race's population statistics" would have sounded as boring as hell, but they make you watch. The quick upbeat nature of the video and the way they cleverly link In a physical sense of the text one fact to another makes it so that even if you want to turn it off, by the time you have read one fact your eyes are following the text to the next fact, meaning by the time you realise how much you have read its over!
Of course as the video progress the facts, animations and text all slow down somewhat and the pace of the music slows to follow it. They then hit you with some of the bigger facts and figures, and allow you slightly more time per fact to try and digest the more important information. I think it works really well, because a lot of the time with videos about the plight of the world you just get sadness straight away and you turn off. Here they have managed to get you interested right from the word go, and then once you have an interest (and a slight background in the subject) they hit you with the hard hitting important stuff, that if they had started dully listing from the word go, you never would have even known about because you would of turned it straight off.
I really enjoyed this video, and I’m going to see if I can hunt down some more like it. Maybe i could use a similar style in any upcoming documentaries I do? But I’ll have to think about that closer to the time.
P.s. Sorry if this seems at all disjointed. I’m afraid this tends to be how my mind works and most if not all of my blog posts will be like this. If you read enough of them you might get used to it, but I’m afraid I don’t think you will ever understand the seemingly random connections I make from one thing to another, as I’m not even sure how I do it myself.
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