“Hello!
Thank you for sending in the link on time and tagging it correctly. I just watched the video – love the narration and the background music. However the music and the sound suddenly goes off in the middle, and as per the submission guidelines the video cannot be longer than 10 mins . Please cut down on the video length, other participants also asked me if they can make a 13-15 minute video – and I had to say no.
Simply edit those segments, looking forward to your updated video by tomorrow night.
Nilofar.
This is a message we get from Nilofar after hurriedly submitting our video “From Wild To Digital World ” for the Digital Natives video contest.
The message was referred to John Musila, one of the KNN members that we had suggested to be the contact person during this contest. The message was demoralizing as time was not on our side.
We had one month to work on the video but were still busy doing some other things, though we registered in time. The contest required us to first write a proposal elaborating on what our video will be all about after reading and choosing a topic from one of the four books available online. We did all that and later got an email that our proposal was approved so we qualified and could go ahead and make a video that would be enrolled for competition.
It was only two days left to the deadline of submission of the videos, we had hardly started working on it, the previous two days we were very busy filming the Butterfly Works Project, so we were done and were now ready to work on this DN video before the deadline ends, only to realize that the footage we had saved on the hard disk for the video could not be used anymore, the hard drive had crashed, so we were stuck.
How will we start filming everything again and edit within the short time remaining? we thought, at some point we were stranded, but we could not afford to let this chance go, come on, we must do something, we all had the same spirit.
“Call Kepha, the Director, to help us fix the hard disk” someone suggested, yes I called Kepha, but this would take sometime before it is fixed and we will miss out the chance.
Still standing there inside Map Kibera Trust Office, looking at each other in a confused mode,
“Hey guys lets go and get new footage, we can’t sit here and wait for Kepha” I said, then we quickly divided ourselves, Joe and Eddie were going to get footage of the Ngong forest and some shots of schools and hospitals, while Jacob and I were taking Mildred out to the field for mapping interviews and some more cutaways, Steve and John would remain back for editing, and off we went.
Back to the office we noticed that we needed an interview from a member of Voice of Kibera to make our story complete, luckily enough Sande appeared then we quickly set him up for an interview which was successful. The program was so tight that we had to do everything the same day, because the following day was the deadline, we then took Steve down to the railway line to let him talk about KNN, the tripod was so disappointing but we managed with it then rushed back to the office, now I was to go outside with Jacob to do the narration as Steve was previewing the shots we had taken so far, as we wait the shots from Joe and Eddie.
Time check 2pm Joe and Eddie brought the footage and editing started, by 8pm Steve was done, the video was ready for consumption, so we left it uploading overnight. Coming to the office very early the following morning, to check if our video was uploaded, I met a big message on the screen, “sorry the upload was interrupted due to internet interruption” I had to start afresh. The uploading process also became a nightmare, it could get up to 82% then stops there, but after trying three times without success, we almost gave up, then we decided to use a different computer which finally worked.
We were happy after sending the link to the DN, little did we know that we still had a lot to correct, the message in the first paragraph surprised us, we went back to the time line corrected the video and resent it, then quickly got a response from Nilofar that it was better now and that he loved it.
We were now relieved, I personally felt as if I had just walked out from a prison cell, I was a free man again after a very busy working week.
Before we submitted the video we called Kepha to view it and comment, “this is a winning stuff” is all he said, we were happy considering how hurriedly we worked on it, we had high hopes of winning, we mobilized our friends on Facebook and Twitter to vote for our video which they cooperatively did, the votes from the public alone were not going to determine the winner, there was a panel of judges to also watch and decide the top two winners.
Am happily writing this blog after the announcement that we were the top position, with over 10000 votes, followed closely by Marie a lady from USA with 9000 votes.
We have won a prize of 500 EUROS, I must say thanks a lot to everyone that helped us make it through, those who voted, those we interviewed the Digital Natives Staff, the Jury, all KNN members for a wonderful cooperation and Map Kibera Trust at large for the this great platform to exercise our skills.
By Joshua Ogure,
KNN Coordinator