If you've read my daily blog for the past 10 years you know how I have this love-hate relationship with my toy collection addiction.
I fully acknowledge how depressing it is to be an adult collector of a 20 year old toy line. I full acknowledge that I have a problem in the sense that a whole lotta money goes to shit that just sits on a shelf either in or out of a box or card.
It is even more strange when I constantly try to justify the collecting habit in light of house repairs and other major important events that affect reality at large.
I'm really not a part of the typical Transformers fandom. I don't relate all that much to a lot of the people who attend cons or bitch/rant on message boards and I rarely can deal with individuals who eat, breathe, and shit their specific geek thing at the expense of other aspects of their lives.
Yes. The mere fact I blog about and document this silly collection of mine is sick and twisted but it is only a small part of my life and will one day fade into oblivion as such things do.
But I would really like to get back into the things I wanted to do when I was at university and while I never went into a career in animation and filmmaking, I still have some of those skills (though dated) and I still have the urges to do something there.
So I'm thinking about what it would take to do a small documentary about Transformer collectors . I'm thinking a 30 minute runtime and maybe 12 months of production in and out of my regular life.
I'm not talking about some spurious fan film but something with a bit more depth and focus.
I guess my own self-joking about my "plastic crack addiction" got me thinking about Transformers fandom. Recently attending Botcon in Texas also made me realize I need something substantial to keep me interested in my habit and something like this might be fun to do.
Costs would be minimal and hell, I could possibly apply for some small grants to try and start this. It would mostly end up involving some upgrades to my PC hardware and software, fixing and/or replacing my digital camcorder, and a whole lot of time over the course of the year to plan this.
There are some local Cowlanders who are TF collectors and perhaps they would be interested in being interviewed or being the focus on part of the documentary. There's a lot of background history/knowledge from some of the people that is quite vast and extensive going back to the first Botcons 10 years ago. I'd have to find a way to incorporate some non-Cowlanders and I can think of a few people that I met in Texas that would lend other valuable viewpoints.
Transformers also has some similarities with the Star Wars and GIJoe collector mentalities and I'd like to explore that. I don't seem much overlap between these types of groups which in itself is worth exploring.
I'm thinking something along the spirit of Trekkies but with my own take on "addiction" in the collector/fan geek scenes.
Plus it would give me a new goal to work towards and quite possibly help me get into the heads of the Transformer fans that I have previously never understood.
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I've even got real resources with producing and directing experience to draw upon for advice. Hell. I've got radio voices to draw upon for narration. I honestly and truly have the means to do this!!!