Laura Aglr

https://www.lovethynature.com/

Inventor biomimicry – Jay Harman

Brian Swimme PhD Cosmologist – “There’s not been this kind of destruction on the planet since the time of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago”.

Progress has its price.

Duane Elgin, MA Social Scientist, NASA Consultant – “Over thousands of years we’ve been progressively empowering ourselves becoming more differentiated, more identified as unique human beings but in the process, step by step pulling back from the natural world”.

Dayna Baumeister, PhD Co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8 – “The only way we’ll ever make it as a species on this planet is if we reconnect with nature”.

Earth is here for us to use. We’ve now come to an end of that track and it’s no longer serving us. And we see, instead of dominion, we’re really participants in the natural world. And that’s coming more into alignment with some of the Eastern tradition as well as some of the indigenous traditions in spirituality.

Gaia – scientific hypothesis from the 70s named after a Greek goddess: getting away from the idea of nature as machinery and looking into the Earth as a single living system.

If we compared the 3,8 billion years of Earth as 1 year. Homo Sapiens just appeared at 11.30am on the 31st of December and the Industry revolution have lasted just 1 second.

Maybe this new deep understanding required our disconnection from nature. Maybe to reach this full understanding we had to go through this period of disconnection.

The biological revolution. The entire Industrial Revolution was ultimately about taking. Taking materials, taking soil, taking oil, taking water. There’s a limit on how much you can take. By redefining our relation, it isn’t Nature is there for us but we ultimately are part of the natural world. Our lives depend on t. And if we can quiet our cleverness and we can instead borrow the recipe instead of taking the raw materials, then we’ve entered the biological revolution.

Because nature heals, the environmental movement is a social cause movement.

In the same lines as the “Doing what comes naturally” documentary, “Love Thy Nature” talks about the idea of a crisis as an inflection point to change dominion for partnership and reconnection with the natural world.

Something that really had an impact on me after watching this documentary is the comparison of the age of the planet to one calendar year. It is very impressive if you think about the harm humans have caused in such a short period of time.

If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us. It’s now time for our species to stop simply growing to established a life on our planet in balance with nature, to start to thrive. When you think about it, we are completing a journey. 10,000 years ago we lived a sustainable life because that was the only option. All these years later, it’s once again the only option. We need to rediscover how to be sustainable. To move from being apart from nature to becoming a part of nature once again.

If we can change the way we live on earth an alternative future comes into view. In this future we discover ways to benefit from our land that help, rather than hinder, wilderness. And ways to harvest our forests sustainably. We will finally learn how to work with nature rather than against it.

I like the idea of having the need to rediscover how to be sustainable again as our only option to live on this planet. My fictional story for the film is based on this idea, of a potential future in which humans have thrived to be part of nature once again, a future where the only way of living is like it was 10,000 years, where evolution means looking back.

Directed by Steve Hobbs and Ashley Bruce (2009).

Nature is the best engineer, requires minimum resources and minimum energy.

Biomimicry is the science of understanding nature’s unequal deficiency.

Gunter Pault (zero emissions researcher) “Once we get into it, I think we all see major breakthroughs in the industry, and perhaps we needed a crisis to get to that innovative thinking and just put it into a practical, concrete framework now. Not because it is saving the world. We may have saved the world, but first and foremost, because it is more efficient. It’s more competitive. It uses less energy. It allows you to have perfect recycling of all the nutrients continuously. IF you look at silk it’s made of amino acids, that’s all. Inefficiency is rarely tolerated in nature. Very little is wasted in the pursuit of survival. Our innovations can learn from nature supreme efficiency”.

The key thoughts I extracted from watching the episode of Nature Inc. documentary series are the idea of needing a crisis to be able to get innovative ideas and problem-solving. It shows that as species, humans adapt and stay in their comfort zone and just evolve when there’s a crisis. That is what is happening with the fashion industry, it can’t keep progressing as it has been, just taking resources and wasting materials. Bio-design is the answer to the crisis the fashion industry is facing.

The second concept I am interested in is “efficiency”. Efficiency is the good use of time and energy in a way that does not waste any. Efficiency is the condition or fact of producing the results you want without waste, or a particular way in which this is done. NATURE SUPREME EFFICIENCY.

I have been focusing on my internship with Hidden, and also busy with work, I haven’t had the needed time to concentrate on my project as it deserves.

Here are some notes and thoughts on our tutorial.

Consider the form of a fictional documentary. Video in response to a conversation on the top.

Docufiction is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre that attempts to capture reality such as it is (as direct cinema or cinéma vérité) and which simultaneously introduces unreal elements or fictional situations in a narrative in order to strengthen the representation of reality using some kind of artistic expression.

Who is going to be the voice? I need the text with a voiceover and do some tests. The video needs an element of reality that balances with the surreal. Maybe I should consider revisiting parts of the interviews I conducted and use the video as help to imagine what the voice tells. And listen to those interviews while watching the film, see how it matches and gives context to what I’ve made.

I also need to think about the titles, credits, sound design and music.

My editor and I put together a first rough edit, it needs the voice over with a script to make sense. At the moment it’s just a succession of very nice visuals but it needs some guidance to understand the story behind them.

I posted an ad in a few Facebook filming groups and found Zoë Grisedale-Sherry. She is a writer/director/producer and runs her own indie production company: https://www.grisedalesherryproductions.com/. It aims to champion womxn in the film industry. We got on quite well and worked together in a few edits of the script.

Vicky has asked me a few times why I don’t write it myself, as it’s my idea and I know what needs to be said. I don’t feel comfortable writing for some reason, I find it extremely difficult to put my ideas down into words. I think I feel more comfortable letting someone doing it for me.

Looking for speculative fiction stories using ecofeminism values, I was highly inspired by the dystopian novel “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler (1993). Butler introduces a near-future dystopia in which society has collapsed due to climate change. It unfolds through the journal entries of Lauren Oya Olamina, its protagonist, who lives with her family in one of the walled neighborhoods, and is equipping herself to survive in the future.

The visionary sci-fi author envisaged an alternate future that foresaw many aspects of life today. She extrapolated her vision of a near-future dystopia from what she read in the news, forecasting what kind of collapse might result if the forces of late-stage capitalism, climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and the tech industry continued unhampered. 

I was inspired by various aspects of this novel when writing the script of my film. I liked the way she speculated about a potential future after an imminent ecological collapse, what does society look like in this future? Society has reverted to chaos due to resource scarcity and poverty, and mixed-race relationships are stigmatized amid attacks against religious and ethnic minorities. Resource scarcity is something I am looking into for my film too. How can we manufacture materials from already existing ones, without extracting them from nature?

I found it interesting that the reader knows the story from a first-person perspective. This way of narration makes the audience empathize more with the story from the beginning.

I have received the rushes from Cinelab. I have also found an editor that wants to collaborate in the project.

I have also developed the BTS stills we took with a film camera:

I finally have some time to think and write about everything that happened during the filming of the project. Three days full of unforeseen circumstances, very stressful but also very rewarding. I am very happy I got to film my idea and direct a lovely team of 15 people that decided to collaborate with my idea.

DAY 1 – 24th August

The trousers from one of the looks were delivered in the morning just one hour before we had to leave, luckily in time. The first car drove to the location (DOP, 1AC, stylist, producer, and myself). After four hours drive and a little car accident, we arrived at the accommodation. The landlady was very excited about having us and told us all the stories of when the Game of Thrones cast stayed in this little town of the North of Spain. We went to do a location recce but it was quite late and we missed the light. We could just locate one place.

Fiorella (art director) was meant to fly to Madrid from London that night, but she called me from the airport. She could not take the plane because she took the wrong passport with her to the airport. We checked flights for the morning, but the earliest one arrives in Madrid later than the time the cars are scheduled to drive to the location. We decided she’d fly to Barcelona, take the train to Zaragoza from where one of the cars will pick her up at 3pm, and take her to the location (1hr drive). SO GLAD SHE CAME NEVERTHELESS! I thought I’d not have an art director at the very last minute.

DAY 2 – 25th August

Warplanes woke me up, the bomb testing was happening in the Bardenas reservoir in the morning and we could hear it from our accommodation.

The other two cars came from Madrid in the morning. Makeup and styling have started while I go back to finish the recce with the DOP and the loaded film camera to get some establishing shots. One of the cars is driving to Zaragoza to pick up Fiorella from the train station.

We head to the location to start shooting at 3pm. Fiorella and one art direction assistant stayed at the accommodation to work on the set design that would be shot the next day.

It was extremely hot, 39º degrees.

We had permission to certain locations but not all of them. The first one was one of the not allowed ones, the guard told us to not use that footage in the final edit so I’ll need to edit it out to send the copy to the Bardenas admin.

The trousers got ripped while filming one of the scenes and the stylist got really concerned, as the designer who is also her friend, lent them to us as a favor.

Besides the extreme heat and making sure everyone kept drinking water all the time, first shoot day was good.

We drove back to the accommodation where the set was being built for the next day.

DAY 3 – 26th August

On the 26th we started filming earlier to cover all the scenes needed. It was even hotter than the day before. The art department would spend the day building the set to be filmed later on.

–Yosephine (cast) felt really sick and dizzy from the heat after filming the first scene. She had to spend three hours in the car with the AC on and constantly being cooled down with some water. The trousers got messed up with the water and sand + the rip from the day before. I tried to keep this out of my mind and worry about it later.

-One of the cars got a flat tyre when driving to one of the locations in the desert and had to leave to quickly get it repaired.

-We filmed with Victor while Yosephine was recovering from the heat stroke. The park guards were around all the time.

-Yosephine had to leave in the first car that was driving her to Zaragoza to get a train home. The rest of the team stayed with Victor to finish some scenes.

-IT’S A WRAP. We finished one hour later than we were supposed to. The moment we said “it’s a wrap”, the warplanes flew over making a very frightening noise. I rushed everyone to pack everything. We had to leave ASAP. We were heading out of the park with the cars. It was already very dark and we realized we’d left part of the set (a wooden table) and had to drive back. I was panicking, didn’t want to risk anyone’s safety.

Luckily we all left in time, safe and sound.

The day after the shoot I took the trousers to the modiste to repair the hole in them. I also took them to the dry cleaner but they can’t clean all the stains as their machine would break the trousers apart. I had to hand wash each stain before giving them back to the designer. Luckily they were alright and the designer didn’t even notice about it.

On my way back to London with the films, I had to make sure they didn’t place them on the Xray control.

Fiorella won’t be able to fly to Spain due to quarantine restrictions, so she will direct the art remotely. Two assistants will be on set for the day. We arranged a WhatsApp group to find the objects and props for the set. I don’t want to buy props, everything will be reused and recycled objects.