These past few days have been really exciting. We are officially making a movie! We knew we wanted to make a film about the personal impact of TB in the mining industry, but we only started brainstorming for our script yesterday, which is rather ambitious considering that we are scheduled to wrap shooting on Sunday. However, I was able to help create our schedule, so I am very optimistic that we will be able to reach our goals.

Up until today we actually thought we were going to make two films. To clarify, our class was not required to make two films in 10 days. That would have been a pretty unreasonable expectation, and turned out to be an unattainable goal. However, over these three and a half weeks I’ve realized that I’m living with a group of very ambitious and dedicated people, which is the sole reason why we chose to fill our last week and a half to the brim. When Jonathan asked us to decide which students wanted to make the fiction film and who wanted to make an interview-based film, we all told him that we wanted to stay together and work on both projects as a full class. Unfortunately there are literally not enough hours in the day left to accomplish everything. As a class we have finalized a script, shot another interview-based film with Mrs. Mkoko, created a schedule, started purchasing props, secured shooting locations and actors and coordinated costumes. At the same time, we’re continuing with our global health lectures and are learning how to do post-production on the film we shot of Musa from the clinic in KaShoba. Coordinating and shooting another film at the same time would be nearly impossible.

The positive to focusing our energies is that we should end up with a very good final product (fingers crossed!). It will be great to be back in KaShoba and working with the Mkokos. I’m also very excited to be making a film again. Even though we just filmed an interview today, I can’t wait to be back on a set. Our class is great at working as a team and it always makes me really happy to see how helpful and efficient people can be when they set their minds to it. I’m also really happy that we’ve started talking about making films together after the class ends. It will be great to have a community of people at school who are enthusiastic about filmmaking with the same training.