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Monday, December 10, 2012

Is the Privatization of Water a Good Idea?

Everybody always tells me about the benefits of privatization when the theme is the economy, that story about competition between companies, resulting in a better price, efficiency and delivery of services.

In Votorantim, people are without waterHowever, the same people forget frequently some contradictions of capitalism as dumping and monopoly, Nobody here is blindly defending the communism against the capitalism, but... What happens when the privatization of the Water System occurs with such monopoly? What happens to the poor people?

Well, I haven't the theoretical knowledge to respond, but the city that I have just mentioned in the last post can respond to us. Votorantim is in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. The defeated candidate for re-election, Carlos Augusto Pivetta, has privatized the Water System and  the result is people with more expensive bills to pay and no water!

Economists like David Martimort and Stéphane Straub show us with some mathematical formulas the discontent in relation to privatizations expressed by citizens all over Latin America (would it be the case of Votorantim?). In practice, the people around the world can see the population discontent through those images.


Friday, June 29, 2012

Between Two Litigants was the animation that gave me the most work ever. The half of the process was traditional technique 2D (except the use of acetate) and the other one was tablet. Anyway, I didn't use vector graphics techniques.


Where the Story beginsDuring the process of the traditional technique, my patience was really put to the test. In the beginning, since I hadn't any practice until then, to make between 3 and 5 different designs on the light table, to create the illusion of movement, I took the whole day. Then, by scanning drawings in pencil trace, It still took half a day, if everything occurred well in the computer prediction, I put the pictures back on the light table and I reinforced them with black pen (of course, it took the other half day). Dude, it was terrible, and the worst wasn't the animating process in itself, but external factors which hindered me. My neighborhood wasn't one of the quietest; there were cars with speakers yelling at people, telling them to buy the most useless things, my mother who told me to get a real job and neighbors who loved reforms, by the way, one of them was maniac; he loved to hammer aimlessly.


Miss Cloude is laughing at the ParrinhaIn short, to animate 9 minutes and 10 seconds, it took me 2 years and 6 months. For 6 months, in fact, I stopped, because I couldn't concentrate with so many hammers ringing in my head. The sound effects and musical part demanded lots of research. there were also many external factors to hinder, as mentioned above, sound cars and hammerings which forced me to make recordings at night. The story, Between Two Litigants, focused on two characters with conflicting goals. Parrinha, a body shop worker, needed to finish his service at time and there was none to help him. Miss Cloude, however, wanted to spend a pleasant afternoon and to have a siesta without problems watching your favorite TV show.
Some people say I don't like the Miss Cloude, but this is not true, since I feel the two characters' drama. The Parrinha works alone and needs to maintain the quality of his service and Miss Cloude needs her space to be respected in order to achieve her target.


Parrinha's talking to Colonelo CompanyWhen I finally finished my animation work, I was drafted into State Military Service and sent to a barracks in the border of the state. I couldn't even see my animation be displayed in my city Short Film Festival. According to two friends spies who were at the festival, the compatriots' reception was extremely cold (except the children's one who laughed at Miss Cloude and Parrinha's fight), They looked at each other with a huge question mark on the face, others shaked the head angrily.
I showed, posteriorly, this short film to my platoon, some people in the barracks and in the town I was living. The result was equal to what had been to the kids of my city; they laughed at my characters' fight.

Why Do Some People Take Things So Personally?