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I got up at 5 a.m. this morning to go shoot my barber. Why is he worth shooting? Hard to say; he’s a barber because it’s the family business and his parents handed over the reigns of the shop to him, and he has a wife and kids to take care of. In the mornings, however, he works for the EPA spraying disinfectant around various parts of Guandu and Beitou. It seemed like an interesting combination, so I decided to do a little video of him, a mini documentary. I’d been thinking of trying something like that, and I happened to be getting a haircut at the time, so it just followed.
The people at the little office underneath the highway bridge, however, weren’t too happy to see me. They instantly went into full paranoid mode and told me I could shoot the little garbage huts. My barber, however, waved all of these warnings aside. I interviewed him in front of the spraying truck, and then we went out to a series of places, where I got footage of him doing his job. It was interesting. People would come up to the sprayers on the street and ask them to do their basements or alleys, and the sprayers would always comply. Maybe it was because I was there with my camera.
Eventually the crew got used to me and relaxed a bit. I don’t plan to make anything big out of this; it’s more of an exercise than anything else. I borrowed a friend’s Sony handycan, which worked ok, especially as I didn’t have a tripod. The next and final shoot will be at the barbershop itself one evening when I can find some time, and then I’ll glue it together and see what, if anything, I’ve got.
After we wrapped up this morning, though, I got a feeling that I haven’t had in a good while, though, the feeling that I’d actually done something. Maybe it’s not a big huge project, but it’s something. It felt good.
Nice to see you post some film-related stuff again, Keep going!
Comment by Lin — June 15, 2009 @ 8:20 am