Filming interviews for Christian Aid
Last week we had the enlightening experience of filming a series of interviews for Christian Aid in Edinburgh.
Christian Aid were running an international seminar for Global Steering Group of their Side by Side initiative; a global movement to try and engage faith leaders of all faiths to provide leadership in terms of promoting gender equality.
Having spent years working in International Development I can only see this as common sense really. Religious leaders internationally are often the main form of community leadership generally, providing a representative voice for the people whom they have a genuine sense of duty of care for.
Also, they are a shortcut to lending moral authority to an issue and gender inequality is probably primarily a moral issue, along with a socio-economic, cultural, political & medical issue (in the case of FGM for example). So when a religious leader advocates for gender equality, the moral leverage is considerable. They have already had great success in the Kenyan legislature.
Personally, with representatives there from Uganda, Tanzania & Kenya, I rather enjoyed the chance to dust off the old Swahili and Luganda, as rusty as it is after lying dormant. Working with International Development organisaitons and NGOs to create powerful film content is certainly an are of high interest for us and somewhere we could provide value beyond that of other filmmaking companies. At least, so we feel.
In technical terms,. the interview set up was informal as they were just looking for simple vox pops. Luckily, the room we were in had colour variable spots, so I had a ready built key light available. I used a simple LED panel to provide a fill/hair light and just recorded audio via boom (with an additional lapel mic for paranoia induced backup purposes - you can never be too careful).
As the files were just for delivery to client, a 709 baked in profile was requested, so no worrying about shooting LOG. A simple technical set up meant that we could just fire on and capture the insightful viewpoints of this collection of leaders.
We'll drop the link to the video when we get it but in the meantime you can find out more about the Side by Side project at their website below;
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