Film Crew

7/21/08

Today was also an amazing day. It seems that I have many of those, but then again, maybe I only really write after those amazing type days. Today started off with me watching everyone at the IC house eat pancakes. Not exactly my favorite part of the day, but getting to hang out with the film crew the rest of the day more than made up for it.

We went to Sir Samuel Baker School today to film an update for the schools for schools website. Since I don’t have much to do Mondays and Wednesdays and I’ve already explored all around Gulu town, I decided to do something different with my time off. I became a semi-professional sound technician for IC. Basically, I held a boom mike for 7 hours today and didn’t get paid for it. It was so much fun though.

I was so fascinated by all the behind the scenes things that happen on a professional video shoot. The camera man, Gavin, would film the same line upwards of 15 different times from 6 or 7 different angles. Some would have sweeping shots closing in on the subject, others would pan away, while used the wide angle lens, and others still were just in tight on the subject. I asked him if he enjoyed the filming or editing more, and he told me that he doesn’t really do any of the editing. He just films these schools with so many different shots and then lets the creative teams at IC decide what to do with the footage.

All three of the people working with the film crew are from San Diego and went to the local Universities. The camera man, in particular, reminded me a lot of Michael Fay. He went to school at SUSD and then film school. Now he lives in LA with his wife who is a pastor and has a baby named Oliver Aaron. Ok, maybe those last two things are true, but he was still a very fun guy. During the entire day, all four of us got along so well, you would have thought we were siblings.

We finished the day at Sacred Heart, filming a girl name Lilian. She wrote a poem about the LRA and Joseph Kony that was published in the paper and now IC is doing a little documentary on her. Her interview was the most conflicted of the day because in one breathe she told us of how she did not expect there to ever be peace in her lifetime and in the next, we got some great footage of her laughing and dancing. Again, it was so fascinating to see how the professionals worked and got the shots they needed. Even the way they interacted with their subjects to get them to laugh naturally, or just smile without saying a word was a credit to their professionalism.