For the last four months, I’ve been pouring myself into this four-part film series. After four countries, 30+ interviews, and way too many Clif-bar meals… here’s the trailer to the series. I’m neck-deep in editing each of the four films, which will be out in May…
England, South Africa, India, Nashville, NYC, Wash DC.
Last year, I spent two weeks in Sierra Leone. One was with an awesome org called END7, and one was by my lonesome in Freetown — trudging around a muddy market with an enthusiastic young translator named Omar and a dedicated driver named Osman. Just a couple months before, cholera struck the capitol city hard, infecting up to 2,000 new people in the worst weeks. By the end of the summer, about 300 people had died of the swift disease.
Cholera is spread through contaminated water and food. It makes your body lose fluids so fast, it can kill you in less than a day. When the epidemic first hit Freetown, a handfull of international news orgs picked it up, reporting the numbers perishing and attributing the disease to unsanitary and crowded living conditions in the slums.
There’s no doubt the slum conditions helped cholera rip through Freetown. But I was a little sick of hearing about the epidemic from this very high-up perspective about poor people living in squallor, dying in scores. That’s often how we tell what’s going on in places like Sierra Leone — ‘those people.’ Who are ‘those people’? Are they as helpless and uneducated about hygiene + sanitation as they’re made out to be?
I wanted to know. So I roamed around Mabella slum, chatting with people just after the major cholera outbreak had subsided. I met a girl named Myama. And I shot this story.
There are two things I’d like to share were my favorite parts of working on this story:
(1) There is no solution.
Almost all the client work I do is for nonprofits. Promotional and advocacy films are pretty weak without a call-to-action (that’s the part at the end where you’re told what you can do to make a difference). The version of the film above has a slide for Bread for the World, an organization that purchased a license for the film. But the film itself is not for promoting Bread, nor is it for telling you what you can do to help Myama. It’s an independent short film, made to give you a glimpse of life in Mabella through a deadly epidemic.
I don’t believe a donate button, a letter or petition to a political official, or an ask to Tweet (the common calls-to-action) have anything to do with this piece. Nor do I believe it’s inherently a filmmaker or journalist’s responsibility to tell you what the best ‘solution’ is*. I believe my responsibility is to tell you a story. It’s to make a situation, an issue, a topic, a news event, personal enough that you might give a damn. It’s to teach you about something, to offer perspective from a character who’s been through it.
*That’s not to say that all filmmakers / journalists should shy away from said ‘solutions.’ It just shouldn’t be expected of all films or journalistic visual stories about poverty. In general, I think assuming your story character’s situation comes down to one or two solutions is dangerous; organizations are businesses, too, and when you’re offering their solution, you’re endorsing them. ‘Solutions’ are for promotors, marketers, advocates, or — as I sometimes am — people who are making a video with the financial backing and oversight of an organization working on a solution.
(2) Myama is not my friend.
Myama wasn’t interested in interacting with me much at all. She simply tolerated me. And tried to (maybe did, at some point) forget I was there.
That’s an odd thing to be excited about — this girl didn’t really like me. But let me explain why I loved this:
When I’m traveling on behalf of or with an organization, I usually form some sort of positive relationship with the characters I’m shooting. I think this is because I need to represent the organization well, so I’m super-nice-Mo, but it’s also because those projects can sometimes veer far from documentary, and involve instead directing characters and shoot situations (which means more interacting and getting to know one another). Promotional videos are essentially commercials; there is no ethical-line-crossing when everyone (including the characters) is aware and on board with the fact that this is a promotional shoot, not a documentary or journalism project. In effect, you aren’t trying to blend into the background so that people do what they normally do; you’re right there asking them to do something, instead. You get to know them then, and get to be (some sort of) friends, even when you can’t speak the same language.
Now, I definitely know journalists (particularly photojournalists) who believe it’s very important to establish a relationship with their character before or while they are documenting their lives. I usually agree. But there was something really freeing for both Myama and I to just… leave each other alone. I can’t really explain why, but I do believe Myama was more honest in her interview(s) with me about her cholera situation and her life, than she would’ve been if we were all nicey-nice to one another. She’s a rough woman, she lives in a rough place. I’m a stranger who, no matter that I read everything I could before coming to her neighborhood, could and will never really grasp her life. But I could and will share glimpses of it in a story about cholera in Freetown, if she let me. She did.
This probably sounds like a no-brainer to reporters; I think most journalists know the value of having a respectful distance between you and your sources. But in the nonprofit-promo-video-world, that line gets really blurry. And then some photographers and videographers in that space feel it’s their obligation to be ‘friends’ with everyone they shoot. It starts to seem sometimes like not being ‘friends’ with your subjects would be un-humanitarian or callous. But that’s not true. I loved that Myama let me into her life to be a reporter, and didn’t expect or even want more. When I look back at a lot of travel-to-a-faraway-place projects I’ve done, I think most people don’t really want more than a little amusement and an idea of where their story will end up.
———-
‘Myama Against the Odds’ was kind of an experiment in my venturing out to do an independent character-driven story by myself while in the field. I shot the story in a week, and took 2-3 weeks to edit/polish it. I’m happy with it, though I wish I could’ve done more multimedia (photos + audio) within it… by yourself, bringing together photos, audio and video is a bit of a stretch for a week of shooting.
Questions about ‘Myama’ and how it was done? Just leave me a comment or send me an email – mo [at] rakefilms [dot] com.
We need a minute to rewind to 2012. This year has been… insane. Let’s take a look at the highlights:
A year ago on Jan. 1, I finished and shipped off charity: water’s 2012 Year in Review film:
In March, I interviewed more than two dozen fundraisers and created this little film for World Water Day:
In April, I left my job at charity: water to make films on my own.
I hit the streets to report on Occupy Wall Street’s Spring Training:
I started writing all the site copy for an incredible new fundraising platform called Catapult. They launched in September, check them out here >
Come May, I teamed up with cinematographer Chetan Patel to shoot a six-part series of videos about/for Vistaprint, one of the world’s biggest printing companies:
In early June, I edited my first TV PSA for the New York Charter School Center:
And then in July, I shot/edited a little diddy on their school tours, too:
Also in July, I teamed up with Mustache Agency + cinematographer Reuben Hernandez to shoot an intimate interview with Isaac Mizrahi on finding inspiration here in NYC:
By August, I started shooting the first story on a documentary series on debt. I hope to launch the series in late 2013…
September brought me an amazing reel of footage from Dallas Clayton’s book tour, sponsored by Future Fortified. I edited a recap of the tour:
In October, I traveled to Sierra Leone, where I shot a film for an awesome nonprofit called END7 in the countryside.
I then camped out in Freetown to shoot my first independent international film, which will be published in January 2013, and also to report a short news piece on the end of Africa’s worst cholera epidemic in 15 years.
In Sierra Leone, I met some incredibly interesting people, re-learned the true importance of good fixers, and semi-succeeded at becoming a fly on the wall of one of West Africa’s most crowded slums.
In November, I traveled to Afghanistan to shoot a film (which is in post-production) with Red Reel. More on that here >
Upon return, I reported a piece for the BBC on art in Kabul:
Whew. It’s been an incredible year.
I’m grateful to have worked with a ton of really stellar people and orgs: the charity: water staff, Chetan Patel, END7, Future Fortified, Gather, New York City Charter School Center, Allie Bombach / Red Reel Video, Mountain2Mountain, Reuben Hernandez, The Adventure Project, Equip Liberia and Mustache Agency.
Onward and upward. Or sidewaysward. Or whateverward. 2013, here we come.
This past week, I was happy to edit a short video about Future Fortified‘s Kenya program, which launched in 2012 and has since provided nutrition education + packets for more than 20,000 people in southern areas of the country.
The process of pulling together a video you did not shoot (cinematographer here was by Robo Wilson) is very different than one you did. The editing technique is much the same; you need to go through everything, spend hours organizing, labeling, sync’ing, and think in terms of sequences once you dive into the timeline with your storymap or script. But the writing process of the script itself is very disconnected.
Here, we went with a simple VO with footage that applies to the talking points, with some varied pacing and build around a sense of place and purpose. FF’s team handled much of the writing for this, and I was happy to give input and then go to town on the edit. This was a simple piece with reason — the main point was to explain how the program is off and running thanks to all these awesome women involved, and to say thanks to Kenya Fortified supporters.
But it got me thinking about the Dallas Clayton video a bit — something I wrote without being a part of or shooting the book tour at all. In fact, I didn’t even know who Dallas Clayton was until I was handed the footage. I lucked out: Dallas’ adventurous and playful personality mixed with kids’ honest and open reactions made getting a sense of each place pretty easy. But in every project I write, the sense of place, and a sense of people, is where I spend the most time and energy. What were these people on film really like? What was it like in the meetings, the clinic appointments, the house visits? Were mothers happy, tense, confused, excited? And then — how can I make that come across to someone who wasn’t there?? Even if you’re not writing the feeling in words (I rarely do), it affects the way you set up a sequence, the music you choose to drive an emotion, the pacing, who your characters are, and what moments you share.
Sometimes focusing on the sense of a place hinders you — you think it’s so very necessary to include this person or this moment or this info because it was incredible and essential to understanding what you did while you were there… but if the incredibleness doesn’t translate on film, you have to chop it out.
Most of the time, my obsession with sense of place seems to help me, though. It makes a film infinitely more complicated and hard to put together… but when you do it right, it’s so worth it. You give someone a slice of something they could never see anywhere else. You translate a part of an individual person or experience. It’s probably the best part about making films: showing the spirit or nature of something for someone who was never and will never be there.
Reported on the exhibition Allie and I filmed while in Afghanistan, for BBC News:
See the original on BBC News here >
I considered creating a more traditional newsy piece with narration, but I think this story is mostly visual, and the interview with Shannon, the exhibition’s director, guided the story well. I was relieved that BBC felt the same.
No matter how important the info you’re reporting is, there’s something stodgy and contrived about narrated news pieces… they feel serious and awkward. Not to mention, I don’t know a video reporter who has ever said, ‘Oooh, I like the way my voice sounds in that VO.’ It’s embarrassing to insert yourself as this omnipresent guide in a video report. Perhaps that’s just a challenge for us to reinvent how they’re written, though; at some point, radio news programming felt that way, and then This American Life and RadioLab and others pushed through interesting, informal, and even funny narrative. Can we do that with video? (Are we willing to embarrass ourselves to try it out?) Some can. Let’s keep experimenting. In the mean time, I’m willing to let subjects/characters in the piece take the lead where that’s possible.
Kabul, Afghanistan.