“What are you doing next week? Do you have a passport?!”
It’s a rainy Tuesday morning in Vancouver, and I’m riding on a city bus on the way to shoot a video about seeing-eye dogs at a local animal shelter, when I get the most important phone call of my life.
“There’s a project going on in Vietnam, and they need a guy to come out and film what they’re doing.”
Trying to sound unfazed, I hide my obvious enthusiasm at the thought of simply packing up and heading around the world in under a week’s time as Bill Thumm, the director of the Bosa Center of Film & Animation, continues on.
“They can meet up on Thursday afternoon, will that work for you?”
And just like that, in two days time, on that Thursday afternoon meeting, my life was about to change forever. I met the Chrises: Dr Chris Bottril, Dean of Capilano University’s Tourism program, and Chris Carnovale, the project’s logistics guy and resident ‘fixer’.
The crash course interview, where only moments before meeting the pair did I finally get a chance to check out the CBT Vietnam website and get familiarized with who the Dao and Hmong peoples were and where they lived around Sapa, was a memorable one.
As Chris Carnovale, or Carno - as we like to call him - asked me about my past travel experience, only to realize that apart from a few road trips and a couple all-inclusive escapes to Mexico and Cuba I was pretty green, I saw his face go sickly pale, and the stress levels go up.
“I don’t care what you’re doing on this trip. I just need to know if you’re going to freak out because that can’t happen. And we won’t be able to wait around for you.”
Chris Bottril, on the other hand, told me more about the project, about sustainable tourism and about what our goals were as well as ideas on how to get them across in the video. I was immediately both interested and excited about the project, and given my experience working on film sets where a short day on set clocks in around 12 hours, and you routinely find yourself in uncomfortable situations, dealing with opposing personalities and sometimes polarizing team dynamics, I felt pretty confident that I’d be able to come in and get the job done. Or at least show up and not freak out in the airport.
I felt that I’d be fine out there, but how do you really know? Working and dealing with challenges and situations in a culture that is about as far removed as it can be from what we deem to be normal seemed to be a big question mark. And then dealing with the pressures of shooting a documentary and playing the role of director, cameraman, and editor wouldn’t make the gig any easier.
A phone interview with team leader, Jen Reilly followed the conversation with the Chrises, and it became clear that I was going to be a part of this trip. But it also became clear that I had under 72hrs to completely prep and organize a camera package to film a short documentary about a subject I had no idea or past knowledge about.
In addition, it became clear that getting an extra round-trip ticket to Hanoi, an extra Vietnamese visa, four travel vaccination shots, passport photos, and all the other basic preparations you’d make for a trip across the globe had to now be dealt with in a compressed amount of time.
To say that everything that needed to happen for the film to be made was impossible, which at times I felt, would not be acceptable. No couldn’t be an option.
I had no way of testing a lot of the gear I’d be bringing over to Vietnam; an old Macbook G4 laptop, the only one available for us to use, for example, frequently crashed while we tried turning it on in the studio. One of the hard drives that we’d copy media onto in the field was duct-taped together. Another drive had a horrible buzzing noise when plugged in.
The extra expense and stress that my surprise involvement automatically added to the not-for-profit-project certainly made the pressure on myself to be fully ready and able to film on day one in Vietnam all the more greater. I took videotapes to record onto as a last resort if the laptop, hard drive or main camera failed - the equivalent of planning to record a symphony orchestra piece on an old cassette tape.
And as I continued sorting through and testing the equipment from the Bosa Centre for Film and Animationat Capilano University, Chris Bottril called to reveal to me that whatever this film that I was creating was - I still wasn’t completely sure myself - that it had to be completely finished and ready to be screened at the PATA Foundation Conference taking place in less than a week after we’d return.
Crazy? Sure. Impossible? Nope. By this point my flight with the team was scheduled, my Visa greased past Vietnamese immigration far quicker than the typical processing period, and I was able to get all my vaccines, malaria pills, and film equipment locked-down and ready for departure.
Planning ahead to cutting a video in 8 days? Why not? It’s not like it would be any crazier than everything that had come at me so far…
As the hours grew nearer to departing, with myself mentally going through what it was I was about to be getting myself into, I knew that without a doubt, my life would be changing as a result of being involved in this project.
And over a year after that first trip in March 2011, and the two project trips since, I know, without a doubt, that my life path has absolutely shifted gears.
The opportunity to spread a message, to share a story through video or new media is one that has the potential to emotionally engage and affect audiences in ways that simply cannot be expressed when written in articles, new stories, or books.
Having the opportunity to go in and film a story about the positive and negative impacts that tourism can have on sensitive ethnic communities was an eye-opening personal and professional experience. It was an incredible experience, one I’ll never forget; and it has since made me want to continue to search for stories that are important. Stories that are original. Stories that are meaningful, and stories that are full of emotion.
Stories that every writer, journalist, and filmmaker strives to find. They are the stories that have the potential to make an impact to the world; they are the stories that have the potential to inspire.
Stories that every writer, journalist, and filmmaker strives to find. They are the stories that have the potential to make an impact to the world; they are the stories that have the potential to inspire.
Whether it be sharing to the world a remarkable individual’s unique accomplishment, an ordinary family’s daily life and routine, or a dying culture’s last chance to be heard by a wider audience, searching for and sharing stories that have the potential to make differences is something I would like to strive to achieve over the next few years.
And I hope that it's something we can continue to share to people all over the world with the CBT Vietnam project.
Kyle
To see the video's Kyle has shot for the Capilano University / PATA Foundation Vietnam Training Project you can check out the project's website or YouTube channel.
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