A series of fifty short or fairly short conservation films which are really different, and positive. They’re about change and will all be completed by the end of this year, 2015. Twenty five are ready now, including wolves, whales, chimps, white storks, River Thames, squirrels, Dubai, sea turtles, butterflies etc.
Being filmed this summer is “PLASTIC PERIL”.
A wet-wipes story and a beautiful seabird, the fulmar, also known as “the Flying Dustbin”. It’s been a great winner but now may becoming a loser. Filming locations include Yorkshire, Cornwall (see photos of Richard Brock and Mark Grantham) and the Antarctic. But also less exciting locations!
Richard Brock and bird expert Mark Grantham observing fulmars in Cornwall
“Just imagine this. You are a wet-wipe (or other small piece of plastic domestic debris). Yes, a wet-wipe – bane of the hidden world of sewage disposal. From your typical domestic habitat – a kitchen or more personal bathroom, you are flushed away down a plumbed pipe (of course from a wet-wipes point of view using the standard wildlife film perspective) into another pipe, this time a living one, and then on to a baby living one. Yes you’ve passed from an ‘innocent’ human home and behaviour into the living insides of two birds many miles away on a sea cliff somewhere, to an adult fulmar petrel and it’s chick. It’s a species with an amazing story which feeds its’ chick by regurgitation (lovely word).
Richard Brock and bird expert Mark Grantham observing fulmars in Cornwall
It’s not just wet-wipes but condoms, bottle tops, and now ‘micro beads’, micro-plastics in facial scrubs, toothpastes and shaving foams, now entering the food chain from plankton up to seabirds. Some large companies have pledged to remove them from their products. Others, like Unilever, Aldi and Lidl have, as yet, to agree. They will be looked at and reminded of the damage bad publicity can do to their image. Witness the effect Blackfish had, and still has, on the huge SeaWorld company and it’s disaster with killer whales in captivity. And BP’s expensive oil spill via the US courts because of its’ mess in the Gulf of Mexico.
Richard Brock and bird expert Mark Grantham observing fulmars in Cornwall
Films, these days, can have great conservation impact in all media and every time another bad corporation suffers, nature wins a little more.
Plastics turn up in seabirds and also on our beaches, and, via the food chain, through fish for example, right back to that kitchen where the wet-wipe began its’ journey of death and destruction. We look at the all-connecting problems of plastics and pollution at sea, not only in Britain, but across the planet’s oceans to the Plastic Pacific and the Antarctic, eventually returning back up those pipes of the fulmar to our own lifestyles, innocent as they may seem.” Richard Brock, founder of the Brock Initiative.
Following Mr Brock - Chasing Fulmars by Kimi Stewart
Richard's films will be released online later this year.
Comment below or contact: Richard Brock
Visit: brockinitiative.org & facebook.com/brockinitiative & twitter.com/brockinitiative
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