In my final year of University I was lucky enough to have been selected to travel to France with a handful of other students to attend the Festival De Gannat Les Cultures Du Monde, which if you don't speak French means Cultures of the World Festival in Gannat, This incredible experience placed us in the small town of Gannat, four hours south of Paris for a little over a week. While there we worked in teams attending the festival events on a rotating roster allowing some to shoot the precedings while others edited the footage from the previous day
back at the hostel we were staying in.
It was a hectic schedule as the goal of the trip was to draw in visitors so the videos we worked on needed to be finalised and posted to social media while the festival was still running and often the Festival had shows running from early in the morning until as late as 11PM, this resulted in some crazy 14 hour days, but the adrenaline of being so far from home and surrounded by amazing music and dancing seemed to fuel us on.
The Festival drew in performing troops from all around the world so we each decided to pick one of the nations and make a focused mini-documentary about them. On the opening night performance I was instantly drawn to the performers from Mexico, they sang a song that was so beautiful I knew I had to feature it in my video, luckily we managed to get an line out from the mixing desk at the performance so I had a clean take of the entire song to cut the documentary to.
A set back that we discovered on the trip was that with performers from all over the world very few spoke fluent English, this made interviews difficult, we managed to obtain someone to translate the Spanish during the shooting of the interviews but once in the edit bay it became apparent that the translations were quite heavily paraphrased, Working with what we had I'm incredibly proud of this video. I remember when we released the video halfway through the festival word got back to me that the Mexican performers had seen the video and were thrilled with it. A day later I ran into a few of the performers, Unable to speak eachother's language I somehow managed to communicate to lead singer that I had made the video, and without word he wrapped his arms around me in the biggest bear hug I had every received, still to this day it is one of the most satisfying moments if my career.
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