International media collaboration has been quite an interesting course this semester and definitely one of my favourites. This course is all about collaborating and interacting with people and clients from other cultures and coming up with a suitable project. This semester, the theme for this course was Kenya. We were supposed to go to Kenya during the semester break and collaborate with artists from Kuona trust and other media technicians but unfortunately the trip got cancelled because the students did not show much interest for some reason, which was quite sad. Despite the trip getting cancelled, we still had Kenya and its culture as our theme of the course and our tutor, Matthew, an alumni of the Master of Media course was Kenyan as well which was a big help. Most of the students in the class knew literally nothing about Kenya and its people, but throughout the semester, Matthew gave us a lot of information about the country, its people, the culture and their way of living.
Like I said earlier, this course was all about culture and coming together of people from different cultures to collaborate on a project. The term ‘culture’ refers to the sum of language, values, beliefs, habits and practices shared by a large group of people. These characteristics comprise the cultural context of communication. Cultures sometimes correspond with political boundaries of nations, but this is not always the case. Barnow (1973) suggests that culture is inheritance and is expressed through culture, “a culture is a way of life of a group of people, the configuration of all of the more or less stereotyped patterns of learned behavior which are handed down from one generation to the next through means of language and imitation” (p. 6). Language and cultural misinterpretations can be avoided by increasing our understanding of other people and their cultures. The study of cross-cultural communication addresses this need by examining the communications and interactions between people of different cultures and sub cultures. The fundamental principle of cross-cultural communication is that it is through culture that people communicate. Thus the ways people communicate and interact, their language patterns, nonverbal modes all are determined by culture (Klopf & Park, 1982). Cross-cultural communication theory begins with the assumptions of cultural variations. These differences act as barriers to communication.
For this course, as the final project, we had to choose one artist out of the four, who work at Kuona Trust in Nairobi, Kenya and make a short video about them highlighting their work, their journey and their inspirations. Kuona Trust was established in 1995 and has been supporting and providing resources to artists to gain skills. We chose Dennis Muraguri whose work involves sculptures, paintings, installation art, often in unexpected combinations that traverse traditional practice boundaries. The sculptures are merely representations of the industrialization in Kenya and most of them are inspired by music –and thus calling his style – “music today”. This was the first time I was collaborating or working with someone internationally. Dennis and Kuona Trust were our clients and we had to make sure that we fulfilled their requirements. Our group itself was multicultural. I, the editor, am from Pakistan. Anurit, the producer is from India, while Eimhein, the sound designer is from Ireland and Warren, the co producer and editor, who unfortunately had to drop out of the course midway due to personal reasons, is Australian.
Pre-production for this project was a little complicated. We were making a short documentary style video about this Kenyan artist that we had never seen or met in person. We were instructed to research about our selected artist, their work and come up with ideas or themes for the video project. Also, we were instructed to have a Skype conversation with the artist to get to know them better and tell them about the kind of video we were making and ask for their suggestions as well. We were also told to come up with suitable interview questions that we would like to be included in the final video.
Anurit, Warren and I gathered in university one evening to have the Skype call with Dennis on the time which was assigned to us. Eimhein was not well so he could not come. The call was very short overall and not at all what we expected. Dennis was completely clueless about this project and he had no idea what was going on. He basically kept on saying that you guys should do whatever you feel like. We could sense that he was disinterested but it was because he was not guided properly about the project. We did tell him some ideas we had about the project in our mind and then we unfortunately had to end the call because we were not gaining anything from it and the conversation was not going forward but we did jot down the points that we found interesting and I would not call it a bad experience at all. You have to deal with all kinds of clients in life. Dennis was perhaps not trusting us enough to talk about his life or maybe that’s just how he is. You have to prepared to face clients from different cultures with different views. It is a learning experience after all. We then contacted Lynnett and sent her all the questions that we had made. Over here, I would like to mention that Warren, Eimhein and Anurit were responsible for most of the pre-production work. They were mainly communicating with Lynnet Ngigi, who was the Business Development Officer at Kuona Trust and acted as the Executive Producer for this project along with Matthew. She was very helpful and she arranged the Skype calls and the shoot and we communicated with Dennis through her mainly since it was easier. Dennis spoke about how he likes bike riding so we thought about having him filmed riding through the streets of Nairobi, taking us on a journey through all the things that influence him: Matatus, music, industrialization. We planned to put his voice over that and use cutawaysw of his work and him working.
We got the footage soon after our mid semester break. It was uploaded on Dropbox and the folder was shared with us. It took me a long time to download all the footage. One thing I liked was there was this document with the footage with markings of the questions in the clips. When all the footage was downloaded, I sat down and had a good look at all of it. I’ll admit, it was very well shot by the videographer Santa. The interviews especially, were well framed and shot twice, once with a mid shot and then with a closeup. This gave us a variety of shots to edit. Dennis’ interview was shot in his studio at Kuona Trust. The thing I was not happy with, however, was the b-roll footage. There was some b-roll footage but not enough and definitely not the shots that we had asked for and were expecting. There was no shots of him riding a bike or anything related to music. We had especially requested for it as our concept based on this and we basically had to change everything just because of this. There was footage of some of his work but I wish there was some of him making artwork or working in his studio. A couple of other groups did get some footage of their artists working which added a great deal to their final video and gave it more visual appeal. Nevertheless, we had to work with whatever footage we had and Matthew told us that we cannot request Lynnett for more footage. Sabine, who actually went on the Kenya trip alone, was kind enough to hand out some b-roll of Dennis that she had on the day of the intensive where we were supposed to present our rough drafts and our overall experience of the project so far. Unfortunately, I was the only one out of my group who was present on that day. I presented the rough draft along with the problems we had faced up till then. The rough draft was quite loosely edited obviously and it was around 9 minutes long. As a part of the feedback, I was advised to cut down the length of the video obviously, cut down the repetitive answers and make more of a story rather than just a bunch of questions and their answers. Also, I had mistakenly used some footage of the artwork of other artists in my video. This was pointed out by Sabine.
After a couple of weeks, we had to show an improved version of our rough cut according to the feedback we had received. I had cut it down to around 6 and a half minutes and changed the overall flow and the arrangement of the questions a bit to give the overall video a better shape. Also, I changed a lot of the b-roll that I had put in the earlier version. This version was a lot more about his journey as an artist, why he became one and what inspired him. Apart from that I included his influences for doing Matatu artwork and why and how are his sculptures related to the industrialization of Kenya. There was a couple of other problems present as well that I noticed. There was some background noise during the interview of some other people talking at a few places. Also, what I realized is that to cut down the length of the video, I need to completely eliminate the huge number of pauses Dennis was taking while speaking, obviously thinking how to structure his sentence, but to cover it up, I had to use a number of b-roll images of his life and artwork that I had to take from the Kuona Trust website and other websites. I showed this to Matthew and he was quite happy with it. The only problem he had with it was the placement of some of the b-roll, which I corrected in the final cut and shortened the video down further to around 5 minutes. This time I cut out more repetitive stuff and combined questions related to art and his life. The final video was short, precise and well edited. I then sent it to Eimhein and he fixed some of the audio and sound mistakes. It was then uploaded and submitted by me. I would like to mention that Eimhein and Anurit were constantly in touch with me and we used to sit down together often for the edit and they used to give me suggestions.
During this course and while making this project, I learnt a lot of new things about Kenya and its culture. Kenya and other African countries are unfortunately stereotyped to be desert like lands which are underdeveloped and have people who are fast runners. I know it seems surprising but that is what most of the people think about it. While studying this course, I learnt that Kenya is much more than just have fast runners, it is a great country with a strong art scene and a distinct culture. Matatus are a huge part of the Kenyan culture and it stands out globally. It is also viewed as a tourist attraction. They have creative graffiti and artwork on their bodies, and enhanced seating and music speakers inside for a great experience.
Overall, it’s been a wonderful experience with this course and making this project. The biggest gain for me was that I got to know about a new culture which is very interesting. Also, like mentioned before, you have to deal every client accordingly. You have keep in mind their culture, their origins and their views, also you have to listen to them, no matter what they say because at the end of the day, you are working for them.
References:
Barnow, V. (1973). Culture and personality. Homewood, 111: Dorsey Press
Bochner, S. (2003). Culture Shock Due to Contact with Unfamiliar Cultures. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 8(1).
Klopf, D.W., & Park, M. (1982). Cross-cultural communication: An introduction to the fundamentals. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Co.
Pandeia. 2016. It’s Nairobi! Matatus and public transport in Kenya’s capital – Pandeia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://pandeia.eu/nairobi-matatus-transport.
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