Film 1 – Whale hunting – Evolution of the techniques

What an excelent subject for a guy like me, that turns his back whenever he sees someone fishing.

This film is by far the simplest of the 11 films, technically speaking. It consists on the exhibition of a set of photos:

Sequence of photos and video excerpts, showing the main hunting methods used in Madeira Archipelagos with artisan whaling boats. Whaling with sailing boats and rowing boats vs whaling with motorized boats.

My first idea is to film the rocky shore with round rocks as a background. It’s the area where sea and land meet, the whale’s world and the man’s world. On top of that, I will place the photos and videos.

In order to incorporate the feeling of time going by and to mark each period, I thought about 3 options:

- The obvious, which is to film the shore from morning till night;

- To show a complete tide cycle. In this case, it would be very interesting to show the natural ponds in front of the museum;

- To film the shore, zooming in or out.

This set of films will be in permanent exhibition at the Whale Museum, at the village of Caniçal, Madeira Island, and I think it would be interesting to frame the history of the whale hunting techniques inside the history of the village. The village only gained road access in the 1960’s, before that it was an island inside the island.

I think this can be done in a dozen of seconds. To show how was the village before the whale hunting started and what changed in the village after the whale hunting ended in the early 1980’s.

It’s needless to say that this is a personal blog: these are just my thoughts and they don’t reflect the official positions of any institution. It’s just a way of making me keep my head above water in a creative and pragmatic sense.