this post is coming pretty late in the project process, but here it is. I have spent a lot of time these past two weeks trying to find an inspiration for this project. At first I was on a movie trailer kick and it really limited my idea developments. After brainstorming with a friend on Monday I decided to use a narrative from planet earth and mash it up with some sort of destructive human activity documentary – I was thinking ENRON or a history channel war documentary.

So I spent an evening watching my favorite planet earth episodes – fresh water, deserts, a then finally jungles. After watching the Jungles planet earth on Tuesday, I decided immediately that I needed to use the narration from the chimpanzee militia segment. If you haven’t seen it or forget it, here it is:

I spent a long time trying to use Downloadhelper to rip the audio from the youtube video. After watching some tutorials, it seemed like it was possible but I couldn’t get it to work. I was having trouble getting the addon and converter program (ffmpeg) to configure correctly. Fortunately, I have a good friend who is willing to let me borrow her macbook with iMovie, where I can just cut the audio and put it it right onto the video all in one step – it makes it a lot easier.

While watching the slow moving chimps as they organized and then the attack on other chimps – I couldn’t help but think of the great zombie films. So instead of “real” humans documentaries, I’m going to work with zombie films. At first I planned on using the zombies as the “attacker,” but I think the humans raiding and killing out of self defense fits much better. I decided to work with the mall scene from Dawn of the Dead (1978 of course).

I’ll post the final mashup tomorrow.