photo by Poul Madsen

Over the course of the past two years we have taught almost 20 workshops worldwide, we’ve held a number of speeches on multimedia and the Web Documentary and we’ve received numerous requests on whether we were conducting workshops in the near future in some corner of the world. Well, now we are.

Until now we have done so under the auspecies of other institutions such as universities, journalism schools and so on, but now we are doing it the way WE want to. Here back home in Denmark in a months time.

There are 12 seats to fill in a combined danish and international course and the workshop will be carried out if at least 8 enroll. This a five day course, the workload will be immense and the pressure even higher. So what’s to think about?

Contact Henrik at henrik@bombayfc.com for further information or to get the program in english.

I am back in cold Europe again (Oh no! .. and currently in transit at Frankfurt Airport) after two AMAZING weeks in a pretty remote and hard to-get-to part of Western Ethiopia.

Officially I was on a bird trip to Awash National Park. Travelling on a tourist Visa meant I had to pack very light. One Canon 5D Mark II, two lenses, one mic and a 20 dollar plastic tripod (who needs dollies, cranes and follow-focus systems anyway).

For many years Aira Hospital, started by German missionaries in 1927, and located some 500km west of Addis Ababa has been more or less led by a charismatic Danish surgeon, Doctor Erik Erichsen. For a period of more than six years Erichsen was the only doctor and surgeon working at the hospital. This is really incredible when you realize that he carried out more than 500 cesarean sections a year and up to15 operations daily, single-handedly. Erichsen never gave up on a patient and he was forced to come up with creative solutions when confronted with surgical problems and even use spare parts from bicycles and the like to fix complicated fractures and broken medical equipment (e.g discarded electronic waste from the West).

Things have now changed for the better with more doctors at hand and less pressure on Erichsen, but still this small hospital is on the brink of financial collapse. The medical equipment is completely outdated, they don’t have much financial support (only 5% of the total budget) and yet the service they offer here is better than any government run hospital in Ethiopia – even in the capital Addis Ababa.

Dr. Erichsen has to be one of the most skilled surgeons in the world. He could have earned millions. Instead he chose the simple life to serve some of the poorest people on this planet.

Aira itself was not easy to get to. The entire road between Addis Ababa and Nekemte (300km) had been removed by Chinese road workers who have been contracted to rebuild a completely fresh piece of tarmac to cut through this mountainous and stunningly beautiful landscape. The journey through rocky and knee-deep red dust almost killed our Landcruiser .. and needless to say, Mr. Driver was NOT happy. What should have taken one day ended up taking three… but eventually I arrived at my destination.

I spent a total of 7 days in Aira living in a simple guesthouse on the hospital compound and shooting stills and video for a new webdoc. Before I came to Aira I didn’t really look up to anyone and I have never had any personal heroes. Now I have one. I will never forget Dr. Erik and his wife Sennait. They are true heroes in my eyes.

Fortunately I managed to stock up 4kg of freshly roasted coffee beans from the local market in Aira yesterday. They will keep me company during the late evenings once the editing starts!

The incredible sunset somewhere over the Sahara Desert

Last civilized meal in Addis Ababa before heading into the wild

Dusty and non-existent road West of Addis. We just ran a goat down. Poor thing

]]> http://bombayfc.com/blogpost/1853/feed 1 http://bombayfc.com/blogpost/1746 http://bombayfc.com/blogpost/1746#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:33:42 +0000 Kastenskov http://bombayfc.com/?p=1746
- a rant on B-films on a documentary site

The shared love of a well told story led you here, so grab the popcorn and walk with me.
In the prequel – ‘Guilty Pleasures, Part I’ – I wrote about the ‘rules’ that apply to any B-movie:

1) Within it’s own world, some kind of logic has to be present
2) You have to relate in someway to the character no matter what
3) There is a continous drive forward
4) If you introduce an object, an element, a characteristic in the beginning of a story, you use it again later.

- and now we’re down to numbers 3 and 4:
The drive forward in a narrative is equally as important in a B-flick as in a web doc. Remember that you are addressing an audience with sensory overload, disaster fatigue and an ever-growing impatience.
Case in point: I really like Robert E. Howard’s classic pulp about Conan the Barbarian and Arnie ‘The Governator’ Schwarzenegger made a fair job of of him in John Milius’ 1982 version based on a script by Milius himself (he also co-wrote Apocalypse Now) and Oliver Stone.
But the 2011 re-vamp of Conan was as stale as watching paint dry on a wall. Jason Momoa runs around with a braw as broad as his shield having no idea why he is there and where he is going. And neither did the director Marcus Nispel. Only goes to prove that you can not cheat. A good story is a matter of crafting the narrative. You can not save a bad script by using more CG effects as you can not save a web doc by adding more graphics. Period.

As I’m writing this, PJ students of the Høgskolen in Oslo are working their a**** off in order to make storylines work for the upcoming presentation at the Trondheim Dokumentarfestival as the climax of this workshop, which brings me to rule #4 about the use of objects, an element, a characteristic.

In the beginning of ‘Arachnophobia’ we see Jeff Daniels as Dr. Jennings move into an old farm house. As he enters the house, a spike shoots up from the floor almost impaling Daniels’ foot. A worker using a nail gun to repair the floor from the cellar tells us the floor is all but rotten. Why did we need that piece of information? Because sure enough, during the climactic final battle between Man vs Mega spider both the rotten floor and the nail gun plays a part – see if you can guess which!

In the web doc it’s the same: Tell only what we need to know. If you introduce a drum kit like this one in Fara Zetzschke and Stefano Carini’s ‘The Sound I Breathe’, be sure it’s there for a reason. Otherwise you’re just waisting time setting up a prop, you’re not using. All too often you see stories online which are out of focus in terms of narrative, and two minutes later you click away, because the story didn’t really go anywhere. And once the audience is gone, you don’t really have anything.
Not even a story.

Why, you may ask? And the obvious answer is – because they learn so much from it!

We emphasize from the very beginning that we want the students to perform their very best but also that we don’t expect them to create a perfect story. What is most important to us is to lead them through a creative process where they a.) Learn to think of their story as a narrative complete with characters and story plot b.) Learn how to prepare and approach a story technically  and from a journalistic perspective c.) Learn how to set up a visual storyboard with a clear idea of their story’s development from a-z 4.) Edit and export a final film for presentation.

The results are most often a mixed bag of both succesfull and not so succesfull achievements. The objective is to provide them with a set of tools they can use immediately after the workshop so that they will be able to approach their final semester project with confidence. Below you can see two of the stories that was produced last week.

You can find the rest and many other stories on this site.

This is Pachamama, the story about Álex Rivera – a native Peruvian with strong bonds to the earth and a man who struggles to find his way around modern day society

And this is Chico Matada Pereira who made it to Denmark from Mozambique in search of a new life as a professional musician

Right now we are teaching an intensive 4 day workshop in Trondheim, Norway as part of the Trondheim Film Documentary Festival. This is a completely different challenge since we have short time to teach, coach and produce. We are teaching young students from Oslo University College and a handful of very skilled staff photographers from the Norwegian daily Adresseavisen. The objective is to screen the final stories on Thursday evening downtown in Tronheim in a large cinema hall. The pressure is slowly starting to build up – especially since some groups haven’t starte shooting yet(!) – and so it will be extremely exciting to see the final stories a few days from now.

Some loooooong days ahead of us!!

We will soon publish a list of new and available workshops in 2012 – including workshops open for foreign photojournalists.

Usually we at BFC are the ones conducting the workshop, but this time I was the guest of a -shop produced by Marcus Bleasdale of VII and hosted by the Bilder Nordic School of Photography.

Situated in downtown Oslo only a few blocks away from the bombing site of this summers tragic massacre in Norway, the shadow of the departed lay as a heavy heritage on the participants of the workshop. Every last one of the 15 students had in one way or another been directly affected by the tragedy. Unanimously they decided that the topic of their web documentaries should reflect Oslo post 22nd of July – still very much a raw experience and an open wound in the Norwegian society.

Seven very different storylines and seven very different approaches were presented to Marcus and me during today’s extended coaching session. How do you coach the better version of a farewell letter to a loved one? How do you address the fact that even though this is very emotional, that you have to act the professional? That your story is still ‘just a story’? That it needs to be handled accordingly in order to reach an audience?

I’ll leave it by saying that I will never forget the experience…

By now the students are out collecting material for their stories and by Tuesday they need to be done. Having seen some of the original work of former classes and knowing Marcus for the extraordinary teacher that he is, I’m really looking forward to see the end result.

This has the potential of becoming a body of work that will only grow in importance for years to come. Because it’s done by those who experienced being targeted by a madman and because they lived to tell the story.

We’ll post a link here as soon as we can. Stay tuned, guys.