Help African Journalists Tell Africa's Stories

This summer, we conducted a slightly revamped version of the African Film Project, working intensely for a week with a top group of undergraduates from the Mass Communications department at Uganda Christian University, which has 8,000 students.

Fifteen undergraduates and three associate professors, selected by their instructors, spent their first day learning about identifying story elements and structure, writing to video and technical basics for surviving in the field. Their three instructors, all of us working journalists, traveled to Mukono, Uganda from India, Nigeria and the US to conduct the hands-on training and share their insights as reporters and documentary filmmakers.

After additional workshops on interviewing and shooting techniques as well as a robust philosophical conversation about how everyone in the world has “a story,” the students were ready to put this teaching into practice and head into the field. The majority of their regular instruction is textbook based and several students shared that they'd never actually conducted a mock interview or handled a camera or sound equipment, so they were a tad anxious but also most enthusiastic!

By sharing our own personal camera and sound equipment brought into Uganda for the week, we had enough gear to divide among the students who split into teams of two and spread out across a lively local marketplace to find intriguing characters. Throughout the day, we, the instructors, dropped in on the various teams to coach them as they gathered materials to create their short visual stories The students then got a taste of what it’s like to meet a real life deadline and worked into the night, writing and editing their short films.

On the final day, each student “pitched” a future project, complete with a budget and distribution plan, to a mock panel of commissioning editors.

We awarded a small prize to the winning pitch.

We also held a mini film festival to screen each team’s film and critique them in detail. We collectively identified several universal themes that emerged in the student films – from the dignity of work, to unfulfilled dreams, the hope of a better life for one’s children and overcoming adversity.

Our international team left Uganda with a renewed confidence in the next generation of local journalists and filmmakers. We’ll be featuring some of the works by our students, as well as their feedback in the months ahead.

The students have requested additional training. In early 2017, we will be considering where to hold our next filmmaking boot camp and whether we should return to our original goal of training early career journalists/documentarians or attempt another undergraduate program. Stay tuned!