Blog

The initial stage felt like I needed to expand as there wasn't much space. When the wings stretched at the end, it felt wonderful.

Interesting.

Eye Spy With My Little “I” that whatever is going to happen for our species to survive and thrive through this climate emergency will likely start within,

As the sun sweeps west, shadows of life are casted onto this fertile land. This land is alive.

Greetings from China!  

“What are those black clouds with sad faces on them?” I ask an eleven-year-old participant of the SHINE: A Musical Performance for Youth Authored Resilience CU Science Discovery camp. We’re looking down at the massive, hand-painted timeline the kids at the camp have created to illustrate the history of the Earth. It starts 300 million years ago in the Pennsylvanian Period, where the kids have painted trees and vines to portray a lush, vegetation-covered planet. The timeline moves through each subsequent period all the way to the present, where the ominously dark clouds in question hover over towering smokestacks and sputtering cars. “Oh that’s the present day. It’s kind of sad because we have a lot of carbon in the air and it’s not really that happy. But then we have the future,” she says, pointing to just beyond the gloomy scene, “which is happy if we can make it happy.”

"Despite a current ban on a ban on public demonstrations the Paris area – and particularly around the Champs-Elysees in central Paris and in Le Bourget through the end of next week (two days after the scheduled end to the Paris round of negotiations) – creative communications on climate change at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) this past week have proliferated.... ...these expressions in and around COP21 are just a small sampling of those that I’ve seen punctuating the first of two weeks of activities in and around Le Bourget/Paris. And these communications marked ongoing efforts to ‘meet people where they are’ through a variety of modes, methods and perspectives... ...in these spaces, one things is clear: we must be prepared to take communication risks, to potentially make mistakes, and apply imagination in order to come up with new and innovative ways of re-telling climate stories in the twenty-first century."

We spent the rest of our trip filming as much as possible. At 8 a.m. each morning, the first thing we did was set up our camera to capture the time lapse. I spray painted three dots in the parking lot at the location chosen for the tripod (which we have set up specifically for the time lapse) to ensure that the images captured will be as consistent as possible. Maclovia doesn’t open the store until 10 a.m., which gives us about an hour and a half to do some prep work and record different shots of Nani painting. Every morning we went over (and over, and over) our storyboard, shot lists, and interview questions which would change throughout the day as well. We found that while having a storyboard was great (and would prove critical during the editing process), it was extremely difficult to rely on a strict storyboard and shot list for the story we were trying to tell, because we didn’t know much of the story yet.

Nani summed up a lot for Angela and I at dinner last night. She said, “With Climate Change, we have two options: we can stop what’s going on (which no one seems to be doing), or we can adapt. Maclovia is a beautiful example of adaption and resilience. She gathers her herbs wherever life has taken her.  While her husband has been through two wars, she’s raised six amazing children. She’s moved to many places around the United States as an air force wife, and she’s found beauty and health in every place she encounters. Maclovia’s work is at risk of adaption.