Alright, here’s a project I can actually get on board with! Mostly because I’m getting paid. Not all that much, mind you…more of a ‘thanks for your time, go buy a coffee’ type of pay, but I won’t be paying for my coffee on that day and I’ll be getting experience. If only you could buy coffee with experience…
Anyway, there are a group of tree removers who want their hobby to be portrayed in a positive light. I didn’t even know people did that for a hobby instead of a living, but there you go. Get into photography and videography and you get taken to some strange places, meet some strange people and spend hours editing snaps of people spending their time in weird ways. It’s up to them, I’m not judging.
Anyway, some of them aspire to work with residential tree stump removal companies in Melbourne. The main guy who heads up the organisation used to do a similar thing up in Brisbane. He had to quit and get a desk job because he fell from a platform once and damaged his wrists, but now he does it for a hobby and wants people to join in. I guess…from what I’ve seen of their website, I can see the appeal. They find a dead tree, or a tree stump that might one day get in the way of building or walking, or maybe driving, and they dig it up. Then they talk about how easy it was, whether they used the right equipment, all the latest equipment for tree stump removal and tree lopping, and then I guess they go home. They have regular lopping meetings on Saturday afternoons, so that’s what I’ll be filming. I get to go for a hike, talk to some nice people and hopefully they’ll actually find something to lop so I can get some real footage of tree lopping in Melbourne suburbs. I’m told that they generally do find one or two incidents, and if there aren’t any then my fee will be increased for next time. That’s TWO coffees. My career is on a roll, clearly.