Photofilm – Surviving The Drought

This is a very short photofilm that David and I threw together during our training here in Kenya. We wanted to demonstrate to the wonderful people at ILRI that you can build a photofilm in a short amount of time.

We had about an hour on location. After a lot of smiling, shaking hands and throwing rocks into trucks (to prove how hard he was) David had about forty minutes to take the photos. The audio is made up of two tracks. One track is the ambience in  the quarry.  The second track is the interview with the young man, which was edited down to ninety seconds from about nine minutes of audio.

David spent one hour editing the photos. I spent ninety minutes editing the audio. The photofilm was thrown together in IMOVIE 9 in one hour.  I spent another hour putting the text on the slides and encodeing the films.

Total man hours on this photofilm are roughly seven. Of course that’s not ideal and the film would be stronger if we had had more time. But the point was to demonstrate that there is no need to overcomplicate things.

Hopefully one or two of you will like the outcome.

SURVIVING THE DROUGHT

The 2009 drought in Kenya has had a devastating effect on pastoralists. Hundreds of thousands of cattle died and with them went a way of life that had provided families a livelihood from the land.

We met Lawrence in a quarry just outside of Nairobi. For many generations his family have reared cattle on the rangelands of Kitengale. Now he shifts rocks in order to pay his way through University and for the dream of a better life.

This photofilm was made by duckrabbit during a duckrabbit photofilm workshop at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi August 2010.