My original idea was fairly different from the final result. The political issue was the same but the way in which I presented and edited the video was different. From the start I knew that I wanted to portray the state of Israel as the villains but I first wanted to project a mostly victim mentality on the part of the Israelis and juxtaposition against atrocities which they have committed. I possibly wanted to compare the Nazis, but I know that has been done before and I was nervous about doing something so sensitive. As I was looking for possible images to use I stumbled upon images of Palestinian dressed as Navi from the movie Avatar protesting against the Israelis. This lead me to want to expand on this idea and do a comparison between the suffering of the Navi and the Palestinians and the Israli Defense Force and the RDA forces from the movie. My brilliant plan was to get the DVD the morning it came out (the day before it was due.) I then started working with the video from the movie and I wasn’t able to find much on the original ‘Victim’ then I had wanted to go for. The closest I could find was the speech by Colonel Miles Quaritch about attacking the Navi in protection. After using that video I started seeing more of a parallel between the Colonel and the stance of the Israeli officials. Which then lead to me setting up comparisons between him and the RDA forces with the Israelis. Using the two opening text of my video I initiated the comparisons and then used the Colonel as the stand-in for the State of Israeli. In this way I was able to use several existing media including Avatar, new media, and the Middle East conflict to show the stories in a new light.
On vimeo:
