I have been sitting on an idea for a big project for a really long time. Sometimes I couldn’t hold it in any longer, and I’d talk excitedly about it for an hour or so, but it’s something I wanted to do so badly that the thought alone was distracting me from the work I was supposed to be doing, so I’ve been mostly suppressing it. Now that I have a bit more time, I can finally reveal what has been occupying the creative part of my brain for the past year or longer:

I want to make a documentary about people who are both scientists and musicians.

It started out as a blog post in 2005. Then I thought about writing a longer article, but there wasn’t really anything to write. Or rather: there was too much. Too many people are doing both music and science, and I needed enough space to address the many different fields of science and music, and the different types of people. A book, maybe? But writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as someone once said, and a book would not properly express the subjects’ characters and music and the subtle differences between their behaviour at the bench or on stage. A documentary, then? But how?

I tried to write down more about what I am planning in the rest of this post, but after 5 paragraphs I realized I was only about 10% into the story, so you’ll just get it in bits and pieces on the blog I started for this purpose. Over time I will reveal who I already talked to, which websites I’ve bookmarked, what I learned about documentary film making, how hard it was to suppress this project while I focused on graduating, and whose blog post about science and music I had pushed SO FAR to the back of my mind that I did not remember it at all on both occasions I met him since that time.

The biggest problem I’ve come across so far is that I don’t have a camera, and that the kind of cameras that are useful for this kind of thing are the ones that are really expensive and need a good external microphone. This means I will need to find a crew of some sorts by the time I actually want to start shooting this – which is not soon at all. First I am going to do a great deal of research interviews, and this is honestly going to take at least a year. I learned about research interviews during the doc workshop I took. You talk to everyone who might have something interesting to say, and then later think about who you might actually want to film , so the people who are being interviewed are not necessarily going to be part of the final product at all.

And now the exciting bit! I am going to start the research interviews in January, which means that if you are going to be at ScienceOnline09 and are a musician of any kind I will talk to you!
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the new blog (just grab the RSS feed). I don’t know what the updating frequency will be like, but I have been suppressing science/music topics for so long now that I have a nice backlog of bloggable stuff waiting to see the light of day. There will be general things about scientists/musicians, like the Feynman bongo video that’s up there now. There will also be progress updates about the documentary. Science and other forms of art will continue as usual on easternblot , and this blog will continue to be a mix of science communication-related things.

Oh help, what have I gotten myself into!