A film by Joel Nelson and Sean Neagle

Watch a Donkey Fight an Elephant Artist’s Statement

            For our film, Watch a Donkey Fight an Elephant, we focused on the two party system and how it has lead to an un-democratic system of government, which in turn, has lead to greater voter apathy. Our video focuses more on the justice aspect of the program, particularly the idea of just government. Our essay changed a lot based on feedback from our PODS, who helped us clarify our ideas, and address the issues of culpability and what we can do to help. We used our AV script more as a general outline when shooting, leaving plenty of room for improvisation. We were fortunate in that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was speaking on campus while we were shooting, lending more voice to our ideas. Our essay was literal, but we took a more performative route with the video itself. The video also contains some elements of advocacy as well. In general, we tried to make an informative, performative, black comedy with our video. The most challenging aspect for us was writing our AV script. We worked long and hard on it to make our ideas clear, and come up with interesting visuals to go with our text.