Week two of my LiA has been all about pre-production for the Green Camel Bell short documentary film I'm making.

I spent the week studying how to set and adjust my camera settings to create the film and lighting effects I desire. Last Saturday (5/30), I did a workshop with my friend Ethan Chin, a professional filmmaker, in which I interviewed him to receive advice for my upcoming weeks of shooting a handheld camera documentary, and had him evaluate my equipment (safe to say I felt incredibly confident by the end of the meeting that I what I need, equipment and preparation-wise, for a successful shoot!).

I also began drafting an outline of the core questions I hope to explore in my documentary, so that even if I cannot be as politically explicit in wording questions during my interviews with locals, I can at least keep in mind the underlying ideas I hope to investigate when using the visual documentation of filmmaking, which I can use to collect footage and capture scenes that shed nonverbal insight into the tension between Chinese national park policies as a way to enforce conservation, versus those policies as a way to enforce control or displace indigenous farmers.

I drafted a very general shotlist with ideas for scenes and interview set-up shots I can cut between, but the vagueness of who I'll encounter and interview made me realize this trip is more unpredictable than I anticipated---throughout the week, I've been in communication with other trip organizers at Green Camel Bell who have informed me that the schedule will likely shift from day-to-day from the initial planning sheet based on weather and other factors. Furthermore, the details of which environmental experts, policy officials, and local farmers we'll encounter are not entirely defined yet, so I've designed my shotlist with the flexibility to accommodate that ambiguity.

The past two days have been walking through the city of Chongqing with my film camera, collecting location/scenic shots, as well as visiting the historic site of the 1941 Bombing of Chongqing which provided historic context into the city's post-World War II legacy in the eyes of China and the CCP, as a site of resilience and rebuilding national identity after the Sino-Japan wars. After leaving the museum exhibit, in what is known as the "times square" of Chongqing, I observed (and filmed) many electronic billboards alternating between CCP nationalist slogans about community/unified identity/homogeneity, and modern-day commercial advertisements. After learning how the memorialization of such a tragic moment in history fortified a sense of national identity in China, especially for this region, observing that CCP slogan/commercialization duality seemed to present a symbolic depiction of the environmental policy vs. ethnic homogeneity tension I am curious about.

I also got an expedited approval for the ethical aspect of human-subjects interviewing for this project, since I had gotten it approved for my laidlaw research paper last year, but wanted to double-check that I could still be approved for conducting interviews for documentary purposes this summer. 

Everything is set!