When we first started to throw around ideas of whom we might like to get to know better as a concerned citizen, we thought maybe someone that works at an animal shelter, or doctors that were doing innovative things with patients. But then we watched the Fit for the Kingdom video that was centered around the LDS poet, Rusty, where it was in a much more intimate setting where we really got to know what kind of person he was and what his inspirations were. This led us to choosing someone like him that was doing something relatively small in the community, but still making a difference.
In Goldbard’s article, she references a few instances where policy seemed a bit behind the times, with the Muslim women and their hijabs, and the growing prison population in the US. Knowing we wouldn’t be able to tackle an issue quite as big as either of these, we decided to tackle a smaller issue, but still one in which the citizen was doing something that didn’t quite fall in line with the larger community around him. Josh Palkki is a student at BYU, residing here in Provo, but grew up in Oregon, where he was raised to recycle. We thought it would be interesting to discuss with him why he continued collecting recyclables, even though it is more difficult to recycle here. For our video we took inspiration from something we found on vimeo about an artist in LA (link). In the short, we spend a lot of time listening to what the artist has to say while he’s sitting in a chair, but there are cutaways to some of the work that he’s done and things that help you further understand what he is saying and who he is as an artist. This is why we decided to include a lot of the interview, he had some really interesting things to say and we thought it would be beneficial to include things like his dirty kitchen to sort of contrast how he is an avid recycler but is maybe more lax in other aspects of his life.
An interesting issue that we ran into while we were trying to find an apartment complex nearby that had recycling set up for students (so we could film some cutaways there), was that there was no such thing. We spent nearly an hour searching for one and came up short, having to go on campus and to the dorms to find any actual recycling bins. This was comical since we had just discussed with Josh how it was much more difficult to find anywhere in Provo to actually recycle. Our hope in spotlighting Josh and recycling is others might be impacted by what he has to say, like we were, and take more steps in helping the community around them.
