Getting to Manila

In just over a week, 10 amazing students from Dordt College will accompany me on a real adventure into what is a daily reality for hundreds of millions of people around the world: Grinding Poverty.
We will spend our New Year's Eve somewhere over the International Date Line and may find ourselves ringing in the new year a few times while flying high above the clouds. We will land in Manila late at night and after clearing customs with all our gear, wearily crawl into bed ... somewhere. The next day, our work begins.
A family in one of the slums--still nameless to us (slum and family) has agreed to let us be part of their lives for many days. A small crew will accompany them along their daily path as they work, eat, socialize and survive. We will film their home, what they eat, where they go, how they wash their clothes, who they hang out with, what they talk about ... and we will get to know them. When we take our leave after many days, this one family from millions in the greater Metro Manila slums, will be no longer be strangers, but friends. They will still be part of the "one billion" who live in slums, but perhaps, with exposure in a documentary of the type we are making, the world--or at least those who care to watch--will see that this nebulous "one billion" isn't so different after all. They're just people. A lot like us, with kids and grandkids, who want enough to eat, and meaningful work, and security for kids and grandchildren.
Well, we hope those are the things we'll be uncovering in just over a week. The thing with documentary films is you can't script them. A producer has ideas, lots of idea and visions about how the film will go. Then reality shows up and the story can go a whole different direction. And that's what makes producing a documentary film such a thrilling adventure. It's unpredictable, always unfolding, revealing itself each and every moment. And when those golden, serendipitious moments arrive, you hope your cameras are rolling and you're alert enough to recognize the gold for what it is.
If you miss the moment, you tell yourself it wasn't so good, there will be more, not a big deal. But if you capture the moment, and capture it well, you revel in it, you dream about what you'll do with it in post and you congratulate yourself for being so good at what you do.
That's the nature of documentary film making.

Not all the students are going into the slums. While we're in Manila, we are also doing some pro bono work. Some fine organizations are doing some fine work among the poor and we can help them with their PR and promo needs. Two teams of camera-crew-students-writers-photographers will spend their days telling those stories and using all that raw material next semester in an advanced editing class. There they will craft the footage into usable stories that we will send back to Manila for use there.

Meanwhile, the documentary footage will keep growing as we do more shoots and interviews in different parts of the world. With each shot taken, the story will reveal itself more and more until finally, it will all be there and then we will wrap up post production and we will be ready to show our work.

But first we need to get to Manila.