Africa UNHCR Job
Africa Trip
I thought I’d take a few minutes or hours (or days) to write down what the Africa trip I just did was all about. Whenever I start talking about it people’s eyes seem to glaze over and they change the subject so writing something down might be the best way to get it off my chest and a way to say more than a tiny soundbite to sum it up. What I learned was so complex and there were so many things that were so different compared to this life I have here. There are tons of little stories and funny things that happened. But, my intention is mainly to write about the equipment and the way we did stuff physically because I definitely don’t want to give away any of the subject matter of our films. That’s proprietary and not mine to divulge. Plus it will be rad when I can put the films on here or link to the site they'll be on. I’ve been back 4 nights and have 3 malaria pills left to take and this world is starting to come back into focus. My sleep is becoming more regular. Food still tastes too sweet though. I guess eating mostly just rice and Clif Bars for 2 weeks straight will do that. Diet Coke tastes horrible now! I think coffee and water are the only things I want to drink anymore.
Bryan Buckley talked to me about shooting this job for the UNHCR a couple months ago while we were shooting in Prague for Yahoo. He gave me a few details like going to a refugee camp in Kenya and also going to Sudan. It sounded awesome and terrifying, especially the idea of getting that classic picture wearing the UN flak jacket and helmet (my perceptions of Sudan were way off at the time). I wasn’t sure I could do it at first because it timed out with a family trip to Florida for the 2010 US Open Martial Arts Tournament that Eli was competing in. Jobs like this don’t come around that often and being able to do what you do professionally for the sake of a good cause is rare. Basically the only opportunities are PSA’s and political campaign commercials. Both of which are usually not much fun. Anyway that was my rationale for missing Eli’s stellar performance. In the 3 events he completed in, he placed 1st, 2nd and 3rd. I am BUMMED I missed that but hopefully there will be many more.
What we did.
The job was to create several short films to raise awareness about the situation of refugees for the UNHCR. Also to show potential corporate sponsors a way they could help. We travelled first to Nairobi, Kenya and then on to Loki airport and drove about an hour to Kakuma refugee camp. Kakuma is in a dry, windy desert in the middle of nowhere, Northwest Kenya. The host community are the Turkana. Driving there was like driving through the pages of National Geographic. There’s camels and goat herders running around and the road gets washed out by rivers in the rainy season. Kakuma refugee camp is where many of the Sudanese Lost Boys ended up as a result of being displaced by the civil war in Sudan during the 80’s and 90’s. Many still remain, 15 and more years later, but many more have gone back home due to the Comprehensive Peace Plan of 2005. Now the balance of refugees has shifted greatly. Many more Somalian refugees have sought safety in Kenya ending up in Kakuma and Dadaab, sometimes up to 1000 per day. Kakuma has 4 different camps. Kakuma 1 is the oldest. The homes are more established. There are trees that are tall and shady. There are schools. It has many different communities and there is commerce amongst the different communities. Kakuma 2, 3 and 4 are much newer. They are stark and we just barely saw them from the outside. There aren’t the tall trees and the mud brick houses with shiny corrugated metal sheet roofs. It can seem like some sort of twisted new suburb. We spent 6 days shooting in Kakuma. We interviewed and filmed a lot of people in the Sudanese community as well as in the Somali and Ethiopian. There’s a lot of different people from different places but sadly there are TONS of kids. Because the educational systems in Sudan and Somalia have been decimated, many people send their kids alone to Kakuma to take advantage of the schools there. They stay with relatives or with somebody who helps take care of them. We drove in a big white UN Land Cruiser everywhere. We had to be out of the camp every day by 6pm for some reason and we didn’t always make it out on time. Our rooms were very Spartan. The first 4 or so days I was in a small room in the Lutheran World Federation compound with just a fan, a desk and a bed and a little bathroom where the cold shower poured straight onto the floor. Mino and Bryan’s rooms were way worse than mine with rodent problems and poorer ventilation. The guy whose room I was using came back mid way through so I had to vacate. The room they were going to move me to (next to Mino and Bryan’s) didn’t have electricity so I got moved to a room in the World Food Program compound staff area and it was like the Four Season in comparison. It was huge and there was a kitchenette and air conditioning!
Next we travelled to Juba in Southern Sudan via a World Food Program plane. The climate couldn’t have been more different. It was rainy, humid and cooler. Southern Sudan is one of the least developed places in the world. I guess the war has just held that country back but Juba has so much new development. There’s a ton of construction. New paved roads, and modern buildings are all over the place. There’s a huge Chinese influence there. We stayed in the Beijing Hotel which was on the grounds of the Chinese Embassy. Somebody said the hotel and embassy were built by Chinese prisoners brought in special to do the job and it had such poor construction. Also, the hotel wouldn’t accept any currency other than US bills from 2006 or newer. It was pretty funny when we counting all our small bills and of the $13 I had in my wallet $12 were 2006 or newer so I pitched in. We were brought to meet a Minister right when we got off the plane. The Minister of Youth, Sports and Recreation! He and his number 2 guy sat at a huge desk in a brand new office with crisp flourescent lights and carpeted floors and it was like we were meeting the emperor. He seemed like a pretty good guy actually. Juba seemed like a pretty exciting place. The future could be bright for Southern Sudan. Most of Juba was pretty traditional mud huts with thatched roofs. There was a lot of military stuff too. Dudes with AK47’s wearing camo and flip flops were all over the place. It was even narlier when we went on another plane to another Sudanese city called Wau. Near the airport there were tanks and dudes on bikes with rifles all over. There’s this referendum that Southern Sudan will be voting on in 2011 to decide about seceding from Sudan and forming a new country. Apparently there’s oil in Southern Sudan. I’m interested to see what happens when they have that vote. I hope it all goes well. Even if they split, the South needs the North to transport that oil out of the country with a pipeline. One story I have from Sudan was when we interviewed a guy who was pretty young. He was a refugee from Uganda living in Juba. He fled his home when he was 10. Now 21, he lived in a little room in a small mud brick building with no electricity and no running water. He paid $100US/month for that room and another just like it next door for his sister and brother in a neighborhood on a dirt road surrounded by other tiny places like it. His story is sad. He was in High School in another country, Kenya I think, and was sponsored by his uncle. His uncle died when he had just 2 months to go until final exams and with nobody to pay his tuition he was kicked out of school. This man was very fluent in english, incredibly articulate, serious but stuck. He would have to repeat his entire final year of school completely to get the degree, which he couldn’t afford. He had no chance of bettering himself in a country where nobody moves ahead without at least a high school or college education. There were so many stories like his. Some harsher by far.
Traveling back to Nairobi after Kakuma and Juba was like being in a time machine. The Crowne Plaza Nairobi was so nice. Warm water! I’m sure it was just because I was super tired but it didn’t seem real. The thing that really made me feel amused or happy or just like I was back in a different world was the coffee machine in the United Airlines business class lounge in London/Heathrow. That machine would prepare a nice cup of coffee with a push of a button. Even after four days since returning home still feel a little out of it.
How we did it (awesome tech details)
After looking at what few cameras were available locally in Nairobi, Kenya we decided that we’d be best off bringing our own equipment. I didn’t want to have to shoot with a boring normal camera like an EX-3 which, while reliable, has a pretty small chip and not a lot of inherent coolness to it’s image so my vote was for shooting with the 5DmkII. There are some trade-offs when going with the 5DmkII over a more traditional camera for this kind of work. For starters, the 4GB/12minute take. CF cards won’t allow files bigger than 4GB. I guess you could consider that if we were shooting with 16mm film we’d be reloading every 11 minutes on 400’ mags so that was easy to get over. There’s a sound issue which is a tough one. Most sound guys are going to want to record sound into a video camera so there’s a second copy of their work. That was the last thing I wanted to do as I’d have to haul around one of those Beachtek boxes and recharge more batteries plus be wired to the sound guy all the time. Wires! Instead I ran a Sennheiser MKE-400 shotgun mic on my camera and prayed that the editor had used PluralEyes before. We didn’t slate ever. We clapped in front of the camera a few times in case the software didn’t work but I was really relying on some magical solution like PluralEyes to take care of syncing in post. The Sennheiser mic is pretty good though, so there is two good sound options. Trying to maintain a stop of around f/4 or so was a little time consuming as I was often moving between exterior and interior. So I would have to pull the ND .9 out of the mattebox and change my ISO before rolling on an interior. It was a bit cumbersome and not so fluid but we got used to it. I definitely didn’t want to shoot at any stop above f/5.6 if I could avoid it. Since adjusting the focus would be part of the look, I wanted to use selective focus as much as possible and exaggerate the 5DmkII fantastic focus fall-off.
The main thing I was worried about going in to a remote location was redundancy. I brought four 5DmkII bodies. I brought a bunch of Redrock Micro stuff and a cage made by CPM filmtools so I could have a top handle. We wanted the camera to be small and light so we could move quickly. We also needed to have an external client monitor for director Bryan Buckley to see the frames. So I had a powered HDMI splitter added to my Marshall HDMI monitor by Intervideo. This is awesome. The splitter leaches power off the battery plate so you don’t need a second power source for it. It worked great. I operated using the monitor with a Hoodman HM-7 so I could judge exposure and focus. I wanted to keep the camera moving a lot, even in interviews with little focus adjustments and size changes to keep things interesting. I couldn’t hold the camera in my arms out in front of my body for 10 days straight so the second most important piece of equipment became the Turtle X. That’s the EZ-Rig for DV cameras. I bought this piece of gear a few years ago when I was shooting Miller High Life commercials with Bryan. We’d shoot for 3 or 4 days with HVX-200’s with LED lite panels and I’d usually have a wide angle adapter and wireless video transmitters all strapped to the camera so I knew how it would help. I could have a camera in front of me for hours and not get tired. I could move it around changing height and I even ended up taking the camera off and resting it on top of the arm for high angle shots. The basic rig I used every day was this:
5DmkII
EF 16-35 f/2.8L USM II
Arri MFF-1
Arri MMB-1
4x5.65 ND-9 for exteriors
CPM filmtools UniStrut Small
Redrock microLensGears
Redrock Micro DSLR baseplate
Redrock Micro Top handle
Carbon fiber rods 9” and 6”
Sennheiser MKE-400 on a Micromount and a hotshoe adapter
Redrock Micro shoe clamp (I took this apart and connected a Noga cine arm to it to support the monitor-which was too heavy for it. It killed the arm)
Marshall 7” HDMI monitor with splitter and Hoodman 7” Hood
Turtle X
A second Marshall 7” HDMI monitor was for director Bryan Buckley.
This became the A setup. It was fast and I could jump out of the UN truck and start shooting quickly. I just would put on the Turtle X and I could walk and shoot anything within a few minutes. We had a second camera rolling most of the time too in a much more stripped down mode. That was a 5DmkII with a Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8 L IS USM or a Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8L USM with an ND.9 on a monopod or handheld. Sometimes with a Hoodloupe, sometimes not. The second camera was operated by Mino Jarjoura, Bryan’s long time producer. A few times a third camera was operated by Bryan. All of this shooting meant a lot of cards to download and we had no Data Manager. The job fell to me. Daily at lunch I would download all of the morning’s cards to a LaCie Rugged 500GB 7200RPM drive. This field drive became the only copy of the day’s stuff until we got back to our compounds at night. It wasn’t a perfect system, but under the time and power constraints it was the best I had. I would download the afternoon’s cards to the field drive and then clone it to 2 G-Tech 1TB G Drives. I had surge protectors and voltage regulators on anything that had a hard drive when plugged into power in the compound. All the power there came from a diesel generator and I was a little paranoid about them. I think a battery back-up system would have been a wise addition to my little setup. Next time for sure. I also had an army of batteries to charge every night. Since the electrical system in Africa was 220v I brought dual voltage power strips and surge protectors and I made crazy chains of power strips and chargers. I wasn’t sleeping in long periods conveniently as I woke up every few hours- which was good because I always had to clone the next drive or change out batteries into chargers. I think my next project is to come up with some sort of new system for making 2 field copies at once for next time. I need to have redundancy but I just didn’t have enough time to make 2 copies at lunchtime every day. A little scary! I have recently been researching a little about workflow and I found this great little video that describes one photographer’s setup:
I didn’t have any problem with the Canon cameras or lenses at all. Never had a sensor overheat or a camera fail. Luckily I only had electricity cut out on me once while making clones of my field drives. We got rained on in Sudan immediately after being in a hot dusty desert in Kenya and the cameras behaved beautifully. Overall I felt the system I created for operating the camera worked great. I had tripods and monopods in a case that I never needed. Some small things got damaged. Some filters got scratched and the built in mount on a shotgun mic got destroyed, but generally everything went well.
Wrapup
I’ll probably be telling little stories about that trip for a while. I’ll try and keep the stories short. If I can’t, I apologize in advance. There was just so many little moments. The work was super hard and very rewarding but the experience of it all was monumental. When the job first came up, a lot of people suggested it would be a life changing event. It definitely was, but it may take some time to see how many different ways it has changed me.
With my rig on inside the UN compound:
Beautiful downtown Wau, Southern Sudan:
Showing some kids the image on the monitor with genius soundman Mark Kihara, Kakuma I refugee camp:
