I love horses. (In case you hadn’t guessed by now.) So for any project that can be of my choosing, the subject will probably be horses! Professor Levine gave me some good ideas a few weeks ago; one that struck my interest was telling a story from a horse’s point of view.

That made me think of the movie Black Beauty, which is based on the book by the same name by Anna Sewell. It tells the story of a horse, from birth through various adventures of his life, until he finds peace on a farm with a loving family. The thing about this book/movie that is really fun is that it’s narrated by the horse himself.

There are a lot of films and books like this, and it’s always captured my imagination. I love to imagine what the horses are thinking. I often wish my horse could talk to me, it would make my life easier in many ways!

I think I would like to do something about my horse in that way, on a smaller scale. Maybe just a day in his life, from breakfast to daily ride to turnout with his buddies, to dinner? So I would film clips of him, and figure out a way to narrate it – I couldn’t do it, having a female’s voice, so I’m not really sure what I’d do about that, maybe just have captions? But the thing that I would to do make it different is I would try to take some video from his perspective.

There’s a huge trend in the horse world right now, and a lot of other sports, to film things via “helmet cam” – simply, you put the camera on your head or helmet, and film what you’re doing so it’s from your perspective.

Here’s an example of eventing helmet cam footage, taken by Peter Atkins riding his horse HJ Hampton at the World Equestrian Games in 2010. Peter Atkins is the guy who really got the whole helmet cam thing started in the horse world.

Anyway, one of my friends has a helmet cam, so I think I would try to fasten it to Felix’s halter or something, so I can video him walking around the field, eating hay, stuff like that – all from his perspective. I would have to film A LOT to make sure that I get some usable clips, and I’m still not sure how I would mesh it all together, so that it flows easily from third-person view of Felix to first-person. But I really want to work that in somehow.