Treatment for "Fixed"

Treatment of “Fixed”

The opening scenes starts with one voice sympathetically, almost imploring the viewer to be drawn into a problem that affects every community all over the United States, even the world, one that could easily be fixed but would require all people to come together for this cause. The message is soon taken on by another person, but still communicating the same monologue: “The pet overpopulation problem is one that can be fixed. Providing spay and neuter services is the humane and compassionate answer that would help stem the overwhelming number of pets who could be amazing companions if there were only enough homes.” The message is taken on by more and more people, all carrying on the startling statistics on euthanazations, pet abuse and the inaccessibility of treatment for animals whose owners are classified as low-income. People’s faces are intercut with images of the animals whose only hope is to be saved from a shelter or the streets by a loving family. Our scenes will be a montage of quick cuts including graphics, quotes, interviewees and photos, but our message will be the same: that every companion pet should be spayed and neutered to ensure that the number of pets available will one day be lower than the number of people wanting to give them good homes.

Although reliable euthanasia numbers are hard to come by, it is widely accepted that almost 9.6 million animals are humanely released from their suffering every year. That’s almost 19 companions every minute. We want to communicate this hard fact by reminding people that while watching this 10 minute documentary, about 190 animals will be put to sleep. Another statistic that needs to be communicated is the massive amount of animals that are born to families who can not afford to spay and neuter their pet. Almost 70% of the pet overpopulation problem is caused because the pet owner does not have access to the services that could prevent millions of animals from being born.

Because the subject of spay and neuter is so all-encompassing, our subject will focus on the low-income families that could be of the most benefit to the pet community that usually ends up in our shelters or roaming transiently; at the mercy of cars, the elements, and people that would do them harm. There are many successful programs that provide sterilization services for free or at an extremely low cost to the community-- programs like Spay Jax which has seen a dramatic drop in admissions to shelters, and an even larger effect on euthanasiation numbers. These programs are funded by government grants, usually at a lower cost than to provide for the overpopulated shelters and animal control services that are needed in areas that do not cater to humane prevention measures.

The film will be far from a preachy, over bearing shock and awe message to scare, repulse or astonish people into reacting to our mission. We want to celebrate the people who are doing their part to control the problem, as well as the people who are devoting their lives to preventing the problem. We want to encourage people to shift the public mind-set towards the animals; that pet overpopulation comes as a result of yesterday’s community overlooking the spay and neuter problem. Having a more compassionate, progressive and responsible attitude towards our companion population is the only way to see the shelters empty, with more families and pets “fixed” in the belief that sterilization leads to happier, healthier animals as well as a balanced community.

30 second commercial idea

I had an idea of getting together a really strong monologue together that described the pet overpopulation problem, the spay/neuter stats, and basicly the backstory that would help anyone who was not aware of the problem to quickly associate themselves with the topics we would be bringing up in the rest of the film. We would then film a lot of different people saying the same monologue and intercut their voices and images to create a huge collage of people all saying the same message. I feel that this will portray that people really are united in solving this problem... as well as visually it will be more exciting to the viewer.
The people portrayed will be anyone from the people we interview, to actors that we can solicit from One Tree Hill or the film that I'm working on, to PETA rep's, to (hopefully) someone like Caesar Milan who would be a HUGE assest to our message.
Anyway... we really want to get this put together asap so we can maybe turn our intro into a 30 second commercial that we can give to local tv stations for community education and awareness.

We want this to be a tool to help stem the pet overpopulation problem... we need to get it out there any way that we can. This seems like a great opportunity if we can get it together.

Update on Caesar

I emailed Caesar Milan's foundation (of The Dog Whisperer) to ask if there would be any way that he could contribute something to our project. I felt that it would be a long shot, but getting people like him to appear in our project could really allow it to get out there and reach a lot more people. On Thursday, I heard back from a representative, who said that his publicist would get in touch with me soon. Hopefully it will work out... I really admire the work that he does, as well as the amount of awareness that he tries to bring into his shows to spay and neuter.

Focusing our project

Last night, our group got together for our weekly production meeting to discuss what we would be doing for this week. We all decided that we have a HUGE topic that has a lot of facets...enough to make an entire series of documentaries on the subject. We decided that we need to focus in on our specific topic, which is finding the low cost/no cost spay and neuter programs for low income pet owners. It has been documented that the lower income families who make up the bottom 3% of the economic population contribute to 70% of the pet overpopulation problem because they can not afford to sterilize their pets. I think that all of our interviews need to be somehow directed to addressing this problem, or to what we can do as a society to make low cost/no cost sterilizations a priority for all communities.

Dom brought over the camera kit, and him and I set up a couple of shots to get familiar with the equipment. I'm looking forward to the workshop to refresh myself with all of the camera techniques.... I've been asking people here on the film to help me with some of the technical stuff, like our music editor has agreed to lend advice for our sound quality, and my friend is a production designer, and has said that he would help out with any visuals.

Audience Ideas...

So far, everyone that I've told about our project seems really interested in the approach that we are going to take on the subject. I would hope that the documentary would be for anyone who is interested in learning more about the pet overpopulation problem, from pet owners, to children who are getting their first pet. I really want to see our project go as far as possible, to spread the message to as many viewers as possible. I think we are really lucky to have forums like youtube.com and myspace.com to put up our film for free viewing to people all over the world. Also, I would like to get a website domain set aside for us, so that we can not only have a streaming video feed of our film, but also an explination of our mission, behind the scene footage that shows how we made the film (hopefully it will inspire others to continue on if they felt that we missed something), and links to websites that provide free/low-cost spay and neuter programs in local areas and also to the people that will help us on our project (peta.com, sunburst foundation, etc.) I would also like to contact local vets in our area to see if we can provide our film for their waiting areas. They usually have a looping film of some kind of heartworm medicine, or flea control pill... they might welcome having this kind of message shown to their customers (especially those who have yet to be convinced that their animal needs to be sterilized for whatever reason). To offset the cost of producing the dvd's for the vets, we could go to pet companies or stores to shop for sponsorship, or to buy an commercial ad to be placed on the dvd (like at the beginning).

Peta gets their point across...

Whether it's animals suffering in a shelter, or being sold off to animal testing labs, the problem originates with there not being enough good homes for all of the animals that are born.