Documentary Animation: Week 2 - Chat with Devi Lockwood and Choosing a Narrative

We decided to have a chat with Devi Lockwood, a poet and storyteller (she's such a sweetheart) who Rosie met when she went to the Frack Free Leeds meeting. Devi gave a short talk in the meeting about her journey travelling around the world to collect 1,001 stories about water and climate change, which so far she has gotten into 600 stories.

Check out Devi's blog. It is awesome!

https://onebikeoneyear.wordpress.com/author/carpediem883/

http://devi-lockwood.com/

We met her last Tuesday (7th Feb) for dinner, and ask questions about her life and why she got into the slow cycling and collecting stories. We were really lucky because she was about to leave Leeds the night we met her.

The idea of travelling to collect stories came when she slow cycled with her aunt for a few miles at lake Mississippi. She was studying at Harvard then. She mentioned that a year before she graduated, an Asian student got a grant from Harvard to do a project similar to hers after graduation. This motivated her to pursue the dream after graduation, and so she started applying for sponsorships to fund her travel. After getting rejections many times, she finally got a grant for this 1,001 stories project. 

She travelled by bike and plane until she got to New Zealand where a person told her about the carbon footprints produced by flying, and started to hop on cargo ships to travel to different places, instead of flying with planes. Devi got in touch with the cargo ship crew through e-mails, and then did some crowd funding and fundraising in order to collect money to get her into the cargo ships. 

In the middle of travelling to collect stories, she went to climate change activists meet ups and sometimes protests. One of her checkpoint is attending the COP22 in Moscow. She also happened to be in London and went to participate on The Woman's March. I am glad that we met her, she is such a cool person!

When we asked her about the stories that she collected, she had no idea about most of them since there are a lot of stories being told that it is hard for her to digest all the information by herself. Fortunately, she recorded all the stories told by different people with a microphone and made a list for all the recordings in a small yellow notebook which she bought after having felt overwhelmed by a lot of information. The notebook is well-kept and easy to read because of her neat handwriting and top-notch organisation skill. Our deal is that we wrote down the stories that we like (based on the captions that she wrote), and Devi would send their recordings to us once she got access to decent internet connection.

Those some of the main things that I could recall from our conversation with Devi. There is definitely more to our conversation, however I am too shy to playback the recorded conversation because it is cringe-y listening to my own voice, and not to mention my terribly loud laughs. YIKES!

Devi on her way to gather stories from people

On Saturday night, we finally got the sound recordings of the stories from Devi. I was in London at that time dealing with some nasty visa business, so I missed out some good stories. I did wrote down some of the recordings that stood out to me, which I downloaded later on and listened to on the train back to Leeds just this morning. Wrote down some notes and sketches for visualisation of the events described by the storytellers on a rough paper. Taped them up to my sketchbook because organisation skillz! woop! sorry in advance about the jarring blue tapes. 

Water in Dreams 

Mary, who Devi met Future Living festivals, recounts about interpretation of dreams about water to a person's emotional state. It is insightful, but lacking the depth of narrative we are looking for.

Notes from Water in Dreams

Dancing in the Rain

On Carla's 30th birthday, she was stuck on the airport due to fogging. She had a vivacious encounter when flying from Wellington to Sydney. The narration is in personal point of view, but it essentially delivers a message about climate change. After 4 months long of drought, it finally rained in Sydney. People are running out of their offices, people wearing suits were dancing under the rain, women threw away their high heels and danced in the gutter. It is a light-hearted story about human beings close-knitted relationship to water. Give a reason to why we have to mitigate the impact and the ongoing process of climate change.

Fear of Water

A  woman told a story about how, after 80 years, she discovered why she is terrified of water. She has recurring nightmare based on her childhood experience being rescued from a flood. I fell in love with this story on the first sight, I can see this having an outstanding potential to be developed as a narrative type documentary animation. The unique voice, the story, the lifelong journey of contemplation, on the whole it shouts authenticity! I am hopeful for this to be developed as our animation. If we decided not to use it now,  I would gladly make an animation based on it during my spare time.

Fracking

Recorded in a music festival, Marvin (or Martin) told a story about fracking. Yaay! Finally something similar to what we researched the whole week last week and an issue that is relevant locally in Leeds. He talked about water contamination caused by fracking of coals and gas mining. Drilling wells and inappropriate waste management causes flammable chemicals to be in water. Most importantly he highlighted that we, humans, are made out of water, stressing the importance of water in our daily life, and asserted why fracking should stop.

Sailor's story about climate change

It is a highly informative story. However, the sailor is quite a scientist, such that he focused on tying down facts to make a point rather than a story. It ended off with a note that, realistically, we are not capable of stopping climate change, but we could still mitigate the effect of climate change. I love this, but I could agree with Tom and Rosie that the facts makes it dry.

Coal Mines and Sugar Farms

This one is hard to listen to. The storyteller is definitely not a speaker. He stutters a lot, but after listening to it several times, I could appreciate his story. He spoke about a lot of aspects to climate change which are interesting. He voiced out his opinion on coal mining and sugar farming, whaling, and the long term effect of climate change. This recording offers a good quality content, but its disorganised structure makes it more like a jumbled up thoughts. It is least likely for us to animate this one but I think it is definitely an insightful story.

Melting of Glaciers

A story told by a person who works in Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand (couldn't catch his name because of his accent). The formation of Lake Tazman, which did not exist in the 70s but now is 7 km long, is formed by the melted ice from the glaciers. He also raised his concern about the worrying effect of climate change to the glaciers, such as creaking and groaning sound, falling off of the glaciers. The natural landscape is disappearing.

I can closely relate to this story because I remembered I went to Fox Glacier in New Zealand when I was 5. It was a breathtaking experience, and I am saddened that such beautiful landscape will perish if the effects of climate change persist.

Drawings of Glacier

10,000 Squashed Toads on the Highway and Bob Hope

David who used to live in Alabama told a story when he lived close to the third largest nuclear reactor in the world. The placement of streetlights and lights from cars passing through the highway attracted insects and toad frogs, which mostly ended up being run over by cars. However, David observed what used to be 10,000 frog carcasses has reduced to 3. The frog not populating the highway anymore shows that reptiles are more sensitive to ambient temperature changes than human.

The other story that he told was funny but also controversial critic on Ronald Reagan's governance. He gave an account of a disdain to Bob Hope, who lived in a pass just outside of palm springs California, and whose wife complained about the kinetic of wind turbines as a plight to the landscape and caused a lot of trouble for him when he was working as director of government relation for the wind energy association in the US. 

Paintings of glacier and a frog inhabiting a nuclear power plant

Group discussion today: which video do we like the most?

The three of us decided that the fracking story is the one we would like to work on. We like on how it touches on the message of how we can't live without water and brought into light the direct effect of fracking to the water we consume every day. However, we are concerned with the voice of the man and the voice of the band playing being equally loud. Tom had tried to separate the narration from the background music, but it is really difficult to do so. Some other recordings that we liked are the squashed toads, fear of water and dancing in the rain.

For next week, we will come up with a storyboard from one of the recordings that we chose. Rosie chose Fear of Water and Tom chose Squashed Toads and Bob Hope. Although I liked the story of dancing in the rain, I could not give up on the fracking story. It has potential to be a great animation, despite not being recorded properly. Also, we have spent last week researching on fracking, and I still want to stick to the topic as much as possible. The man's tone of voice is what we are looking for: emotional connection to water. What I might do is incorporate the sound and create a visual that amplifies the narration and is appropriate for the background sound.