About Tales From The Bambalance...
This was created as my Final Project for the University of Michigan's Stamps School of Fine Art Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree Program. I spent most of that last semester researching stop motion, puppet fabrication, and learning software. The actual creation of the film short was completed in about two and a half months, from storyboarding, prop, set, and puppet creation to the actual shooting, sound effects, and final editing. Prior to my pursuit of a formal arts degree, I had spent many years as a Paramedic for several private ambulance companies and several more in an Emergency Room setting. I was burned out, disheartened, and overwhelmed by shortcomings and outright abuses I had witnessed during this time, and meant to leave the field altogether upon completion of my degree. The following is a thesis statement written to accompany the film.
Trust as a concept isn’t anything like it used to be. It’s a buzzword for marketing, a tool for manipulating those who aren’t paying attention. Framed in such a manner, the medical industry today is perhaps one of the finest examples of trust turned to marketing and manipulation to be found. The industry boasts of its groundbreaking innovations, cutting edge technologies, its potential to change lives for the better. But the system in which its roots lie is a corrupted, tangled mess of loopholes, abuses, and oversights. There are no easy answers, of course – for the problem is far from singly sourced. Even such a seemingly straightforward procedure as paying for one’s visit to the doctor’s office exemplifies a piece of the greater crisis – which may be likened to an iceberg. Most consumers are only aware of the chunk that hits them directly. A quick glance through the latest installment of ICD-9 coding for Medicare and Medicaid billing procedures reveals a dizzying patchwork of numbers and descriptions that have updated and changed regularly without regard to previous installments since its inception. The result is a chaotic jumble, and is often the basis for errors in billing. As damaging as medical bills can be, the problems within the realms of emergency medicine can be truly lethal. And most often, those individuals who are dealt the most severe blow are often those who are most vulnerable, and least able to make their plight known. Emergency medicine is perhaps the most and least intimate form of medicine in practice. Often, it is the business of choices and interventions made on the spot that save or lose lives. It is close up, in your face interactions with screaming, terror, and tears, with panicked relatives, and earthshaking loss. At the same time, it is a strange sort of detachment in process that allows the nurse, doctor, paramedic, or EMT to bypass paralyzing emotional responses and provide immediate intervention when there is no time to be lost.
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