Due to the fact that we would like to expand the story about the half blinded Patricia Poo into a broader story we decided to form a group of three people including Frieder, Janos, and me.
We decided to make our documentary about (up to) three half blinded or completely blind people to compare their different ways of life, their hobbies, and point of views. Our aim is to document how they deal with their physical limitation and accentuate their strengths and weaknesses in daily life.
At the moment we made contact with Patricia Poo, who we will meet on the 14.09.2016 to get to know her a little better and to check out if she fit to our concept and ideas. Furthermore we now try to find two to three other interesting people for our documentary. We wrote emails to the Purple Parade (a movement in Singapore that supports the inclusion and celebrates the abilities of persons with special needs), including musicians, runners, and a chess player.
At the moment we are busy with contacting people and then meeting them to check out their individual stories.
On Thursday 08.09.2016 we hold a meeting to develop and extend our storyboard so that we can offer our protagonists a gross design of our documentary plans and to give them an overview about which role they could play in it. It is very important for us to find protagonists which have different kinds of blindness and different kinds of hobbies or interests to cover a broader scope and to be able to compare different ways of living and dealing with a physical illness.
Hi Eileen and Crew, thanks for the update. It looks promising. Suggest you start filming asap – interviews/activities and see what the research filming material suggests to everyone. Also, find out from the blind or partially sighted people what their actual viewpoint is like. Many people with such disabilities can see or experience a little something and perhaps this can be a point of view that you can get across through the camerawork to the audience. So get the subjects to describe the limits of what they can visualise and how it feels to do what they do. Looking forward to seeing the first filming results. Best wishes, Paul.
Grussen!
Just a follow up to my thought that you need a 3rd leg for your film, in terms of another character. It might be that you can’t find one, if that is so, then I suggest you make the 3rd leg the world of the visually impaired and the blind, the place in which they exist. In any case I think you need this for the film, because the film really is for sighted people since the sighted are in the majority. Therefore you need to give us something of their points of view, or attempt to visualize the world of visual impairment. If you were able to do this, and also find another person who could be the 3rd leg, then that would be ideal. Either way, give your chess man a call and see what might be possible. Perhaps you could interview someone who is old and fully blind perhaps, for contrast?
Have a think. Good work so far, but try and push it further. Do watch the documentary I gave you to watch. You will see what I was talking about.
Tchuss
Paul