By Bongiwe Tutu
1. Problems and Challenges
There is nothing that is more challenging than working with people. As a journalist you are assigned to work with people who live their own lives of which are often busy. This is the most challenging part of conducting a film or a story on a person; finding time that will suit the both of you and time which can be met by the both of you.
Our protagonist; Mr Nobou Nesi is a member of Parliament and holds a constituency office in Grahamstown. This basically means that he is a very busy man, travelling from Cape Town to Grahamstown and back working for the country in assisting the people in receiving their basic needs from government. He is a very humble and respectable man with such a profound presence I felt so blessed being around him. However, that is besides the point, the point is that he is a man with very little time for admin such as us but he managed to fit us in his schedule.
We had a very difficult start with Mr Nesi so much that we were considering changing our protagonist and our story entirely. This was a very frustrating time as it would mean extra work and unprepared last minute planning. This was due to the above mentioned facts of his prescious time. On our first week that we were given to shoot we had agreed to meet with him on the Friday of the 18th of May 2012 as he had stated that he would be back in the province on the Thursday. This however, could not happen as he was very busy and still out of the province. We then scheduled to meet on the Monday of the next week being the 21 May 2012. This appointment also could not be met as he had not gotten back during the weekend as he had expected. We could not see him on Tuesday as we had a TV workshop to attend in Port Elizabeth and so this meant that we had Wednesday only to shoot as we had to present an edit to the class on the Thursday of the 24 May 2012. At this point we felt as though we should change our story and our protagonist entirely because we had little time left and were not certain that Mr Nesi would be able to see us.
I communicated with him at most via his cellphone and I must have reached out to him by some divine miracle or maybe he is just a truly down to earth man as he decided to fly back from Cape Town on the Tuesday of the 22 May 2012 and meet with us on that evening and during the morning and the day on Wednesday. He would then leave again on the Wednesday back to Parliament in Cape Town. This basically meant that he would travel to Grahamstown just so he could meet his commitment to our project. This came as a great surprise to me, I was humbled and ultimately honoured by his patience and nobility towards our project. He became so involved and so helpful that the project started to feel like a majestic team work. At that point I was so glad that I had not given up on him as I realised that he really wanted to take part in our assignment and be our protagonist. We appreciate him for making time for us.
Once this problem was dealt with, there was an encounter of personal problems with relation to the development of the story and the personal life we were being given by our protagonist. Coming upon an area in his life that played a significant role and still affects him today as he is still emotional and rather reluctant to speak about. This was the discovery when interviewing Mr Nesi, as he went on in telling us his life story we came to the rather unpleasant part of his life being the accident which consequently caused him to be a bit taken back and uncomfortable in speaking further about it. In realising that the accident was such a sensitive topic to him we decided not to prey off it and respect him and move on. Our story gradually developed well as he was very open in our research.
We also had some technical difficulties as we had to shoot at night for our first interview with our protagonist which was during the evening. We were pushed for time as he had only two days for us so we had to do the main interview on the Tuesday evening at his home and the Wednesday shoot at his place of work. We had difficulties with lighting as we have not yet been taught how to shoot at night and how to channel bad lighting at such cases. Fortunately for us, our lecturer Paddy Donnelly was very helpful, on explaining the situation to him he quickly briefed me on lighting and gave me the lighting equipment that we could use at the shoot. This was very helpful as we saw the difference in the film and our clips would have had bad lighting without that equipment.
2. Solutions
The solution I developed was to mainly go strongly with the flow and hold on tightly. What ever problem we encountered I had to think of a way forward and that is what has to be done.
3. Learning from this experience
The most important lesson I learnt from this project was to be very patient and understanding. To remain dedicated as this can entirely inspire your protagonist in believing in your goal.
4. What I would have done differently
I do not neccessarily believe I would have done anything differently except maybe to stress a bit less and to be calm towards my partner when we encountered hiccups. I believe the experience in itself regardless how difficult it began; developed our story. In the end of it all we managed to get our protagonist and our footage. And to this I hold the notion of 'everything happens for a reason' and that of 'if today were perfect there would be no need for tomorrow'. These basically mean that in life you will encounter difficulties especially in the field of journalism and there is nothing much you can do but to keep on trying and not to give up; just try to remain strong and work as a team in finding solutions that will work. We could not change Mr Nesi's busy schedule, all we could do was to just be hopeful and patient that he would find time for us which he did.
