What’s going on in the workshop
Right now the workshop is on hold because of the holidays lasting till the 8th of May. Still, there was and is a lot going on concerning the workshop that I would like to share with you.
In the last term, term 2, I did a lot of scene-practise with the students in Ayensudo and Atabadzi. This meant firstly, having them decide on what the scene should be about and secondly, they had to arrange themselves on the film set. Those ranged from “teacher comes into the classroom and teaches everybody how to dance to Lil Wayne” to “parents are angry at their disobedient children, who did drugs”. We also had scenes like “boys and girls flirting”, “playing football” etc. The approach, however, varied from time to time. Once I let them call out words out of which we constructed a dialog. Mostly they improvised what they were going to say, though. Another time I gave the Atabadzi students the task to film a scene with the camera having only a 20% full battery resulting in them having to plan and rehearse the whole scene several times before shooting it shot after shot. This one worked surprisingly well in Atabadzi.
But the best is yet to come. We have developed scripts, in each workshop one for one short film. These demand quite a lot of the students and the time is running. Further, I am really concerned whether or not we will complete any of the two films as they are a lot of work, we do not have enough time and the students are actually not ready yet, to shoot such a film. Nevertheless, we will try. The challenges are mainly (for the students), to focus whilst filming and not chatter around, to handle the camera properly, which will be the most devastating when not done correctly as the whole shot that we did then becomes unusable. For instance, we are going to pay for a trotro + driver + mate (mate is the one collecting the money in the trotro) for a scene in one of the scripts. If just the focus of the camera is not done right the shoot will take double the time, it will get darker and darker (as the scene takes place in the evening), we will have to pay more to the driver and probably we will have to redo the whole shoot another day. That is why the next term is quite a risky one as we are aiming high but it is really, really hard to tell, whether or not we will get anywhere near to it.
None the less, the students are having a lot of fun with the scene practice and working on our last film. Let’s hope for the best.
