TX minus 7 days

My deadline is now looming. I now have a mere week to finish my documentary. Something that’s troubling me right now (but probably shouldn’t given that I don’t have a complete rough cut yet…) is music. Music maketh the documentary. Some of my UCF colleagues have had great fun choosing songs to accompany their documentary. Copyright clearance is something we don’t have to consider too much as long as it stays within the educational environment. But I want to use something authentic and am kicking myself for not trawling through CDs at the big tourist market in Nairobi. I didn’t really have time, but it would have been a good thing to do. Any suggestions from Joe Public are very welcome….

Another issue I’ve been grappling with is the genre I’m aiming to emulate. I had been aiming for an Unreported World-style:  fast-paced, lots of quick edits and even more pieces to camera to explain the story. However, self-shooting really limits the number of pieces to camera you can do. I am also not so self-absorbed that I want to be seen on screen for the majority of the piece. I want my subjects to tell their story as much as possible – it’s a questions of ethics. Now I think I want to make it clear that I am there as the filmmaker, including my questions in interviews, but without seeing much of me since I am holding the camera.

Update

I am still editing, I promise. Deadlines for other work have crept up on me, as has a stint at STV news in Glasgow shadowing reporters. In addition to these distractions is the fact that University College Falmouth’s media centre is operating on severely curtailed hours as it is the summer holiday. While this is understandable – we students cannot expect the staff to take no holidays at all – it does mean that time in the Avid suites is limited to between 9:30 and 4:30 on weekdays. A far cry from term time opening hours, which are 8:45 am  – 9:00 pm.

Something that I am thinking about a lot at the moment is what exactly the point of my project is. Yes, Kenya and the rest of East Africa are suffering from drought. Yes, the number of people with access to safe water and sanitation lies around the 60% mark (depending on whose figures you look at). Yes, lack of water affects all areas of life from education, to health, to wealth. But why document it right now? What will be the outcome of many people, especially in poor rural and urban areas, not having enough water? Will there be conflict as resources are stretched? Will foreign governments and NGOs step in to improve the situation? Will the Kenyan government be able to do so? Answers on a postcard please…

Back in the UK

I got back nearly two weeks ago, which seems hard to believe. I’ve now captured all 6 hours of footage using our editing software, Avid – bear in mind that this documentary is only supposed to be 20 minutes long. At least, I didn’t shoot as much as my colleague Nina who returned from Uganda with more than 20 tapes, each with an hour of footage!

After reviewing my footage, I’ve found the following problems:

• I used the gun mic as the camera’s top mic most of time. The sound is great, but unfortunately the furry windshield appears in lots of my shots in the top righthand corner. This can be rectified in the edit suite, but is very annoying, especially because you don’t see it on the LCD and I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it through the viewfinder either.
• If you decide to film in Kenya during the rains, take an umbrella. The waterproof cover for the camera is cumbersome and impractical and the rain can damage the camera. A large golf umbrella is ideal for keeping the rain off.
• If you’re self-shooting and trying to do pieces to camera, ALWAYS use auto focus and auto white balance. They are there for a reason. Getting your very inexperienced driver to try to focus for you does not work, believe me. The light changes so often during the rains that it’s not practical to white balance every time – meaning I am going to have to do a lot of colour correction in post-production.
• Always get someone to translate for you as you go along during interviews. It will save so much time. I think I’m going to have to send audio files to contacts in Kenya to help translate where I only have a rough translation. Most people I interviewed spoke English thankfully. I can understand them fine, but I will be asking advice about whether they need to be subtitled for a UK audience.
• It’s a good idea to have a set of release forms for interviewees to sign. This is something I didn’t have and actually it didn’t really come up. If the film ends up being commissioned (unlikely at this point), I will have to negotiate with the NGOs I worked with to make sure I can release the footage.

I will be posting more about how the edit is going in the next few weeks.

A trip to Korogocho

My final day of filming has involved a journey into Kibera, not only Kenya’s biggest slum, but also Africa’s. It is estimated that 1 million people live in around 2.5 square kilometres. It is also home to civil society organisation Umande Trust.

They agreed to take me to a few water projects in the peoples’ settlements in Nairobi to see what the urban situation is like in terms of access to water. I think it was a good idea to give them a few day’s notice because it gave them a chance to talk to the people they work with before unleashing a mzungu (white person) with a camera on residents. The people’s settlements (more commonly known as informal settlements or slums) were the location of much of Kenya’s post-election violence in late 2007 and 2008. Things appear to be quiet now, but situations can turn volatile surprisingly quickly.

We didn’t stay in Kibera, instead taking a bus across town to Korogocho. This peoples’ settlement is much smaller than Kibera but suffers many of the same problems in accessing water. In all the slums, water rationing is a fact of life. People earn a living from water collection which means the price of a jerry can of water fluctuates wildly. My companions from Umande, Njeri and Grace, told me that at cost price, a 5 litre jerry can should cost just a few shillings. However, water collectors are able to sell them at 30 to 40 Kenyan Shillings.

What’s really crazy about Korogocho is its location. Right next to the city sewage treatment works. But it seems it’s impossible to link up the settlement to the sewage network. There are sewage pipes going right through the middle of the slum! Before the projects that I saw came into existence, the preferred toilet was a flying one: doing your business in a plastic bag and throwing it as far away from you as possible. Umande and development donors have funded some public toilets that cost 2-3 KSh to use and also recycle the waste as biogas. I did ask if everyone can afford to pay to use the toilets, but the community groups that run it say they always let people in, even if they have no money.

I got some really great pics of the projects and the environment and we even walked through the sewage works grounds, so I hope to show how Nairobi’s ‘have-nots’ live cheek by jowel with the ‘haves” wastewater.

A date with UNEP

My contact at UNEP wanted to meet me at the very plush Nairobi Safari Club rather than at UNEP’s offices on the other side of town. While waiting for her, I met a Somalian MP. Somalia is in the news for all the wrong reasons these days, what with the pirates and the never-ending war. I asked him to tell me some good things about Somalia, but all he could come up with was the fact that Somalia gained independence first in the region.

Damaris from UNEP is a well-educated, urbane Kenyan, very different from the NGO workers I have met during the shoot. I wasn’t sure before meeting here if it was worth interviewing her. My shoot has already included far too many interviews and not enough cutaways or general views. I thought I would get to clarify how the United Nations can actually help with the water situation before launching into another interview.

One thing I wanted to get clear was how deforestation has such a negative impact on rainfall. It was one of those things that I’d agreed with when reading up about Kenya’s water problems without knowing why cutting down forests means less rain. Damaris put me onto the water cycle – something I thought left behind in GCSE Geography.

Damaris summarised the UN’s role as mainly awareness-raising, acting as watchdogs of countries and brokers for aid. NGOs follow the UN agenda. The UN advises governments. The governments hire NGOs to do development work. It seems like a really circular way of doing things.

It all sounded a bit dispiriting. We expect the UN to solve everyone’s problems. In the end, I decided that asking Damaris to be interviewed wouldn’t add to my piece because of the number of interviews I already have and the fact that I want to emphasise the impact on ordinary people. And also Damaris was on leave at that point, meaning I would have to negotiate with someone else from UNEP.

Cowboys

My last day with SNV today – and what a day. It was another long journey in the 4X4 way out to the Ugandan border. On the way, I heard about this bandit country. The Pokots are really quite violent, often stealing cattle from the neighbouring Turkana people (and vice versa). Lots of cattle farmers carry guns here. Also, because the people are nomadic pastoralists, there is an arrangement with Uganda that they hold dual citizenship and can even vote in both countries’ elections.

I thought I’d been rural before in Kenya, but this really was in the middle of nowhere. The road was a red dirt track and sometimes a dried up river bed. The sun was beating down and there were camels lurking in the undergrowth.

There didn’t appear to be a village at our final stop, just a school and a sand dam. It’s impossible to convey just how hard it is to work in the full heat of midday in this area. Thankfully, there were a few trees around to provide shade. Dan at Quite Bright Films had warned me about the midday sun creating shadows on people’s faces during interviews, so the trees were a real boon.

The problem here seemed to be the lack of rain this year so far and the fact that there is no well here to extract water from the sand dam. It seems insane but before the sand dam was built, the women had to walk for 40 km to collect water. They mentioned that pregnant women often miscarry as a result of this epic journey. And there’s no guarantee that waterborne diseases like malaria, typhoid and cholera won’t get them too.

Now I’m going back to Nairobi and the wonderful Flora Hostel. I hope my last few days will see me getting a UN perspective and also a trip into the slum to see how access to water is managed there. The newspapers tell me that water rationing has been underway at water points in the slums for the last few months.

Food for thought

This morning, I noticed a United Nations Jeep parked in our hotel and then again on the street when we went out for breakfast. Intrigued, I asked a few questions and it turned out that the World Food Programme was using Kapenguria (our base for visiting projects in West Pokot) to distribute food aid in the area. The drought here has really affected harvests and people are actually starving. A sobering reality check on the consequences of not having enough water. I made sure I got some shots of the food aid lorries and UN vehicles.

This afternoon we got into the 4X4 again to visit some people who are hoping to get a sand dam like the one I saw on Monday. The way these projects seem to work is to require the communities to invest their own time and money in return for providing the majority of the money. So when we arrived, men and women were moving piles of small rocks from one part of the seasonal river to another part in preparation for the sand dam. One of the village spokesman told me about how their life has changed, how they no longer move their cattle around. Their children no longer want to drink cattle blood as their parents did for years. They desperately want a more secure way of life so they can branch out and earn money in new ways. The women make intricate beaded necklaces and other jewellery for initiation ceremonies and weddings and they want to be able to sell these to outsiders, among other wheezes.

I made everyone laugh when I tried to help them with a few stones. Surely it’s impossible to carry stones wrong?! Apparently I managed it.