eKaqchikel 2008 - Creating Classrooms

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Fri, July 18 - First day of production and all is well! Unlike last year when we shot everything on the grounds of the hotel, our very first shoot this year took us to the streets and - ironically - to the teacher's hotel. We turned the spacious room where last night's dance was held into a classroom - or at least enough of a classroom to pass for purposes of our production.

Everything went well, though as is often the case, taking far longer than anticipated. We'd hoped to make it through three dialogues of classroom vocabulary (desk, chair, paper, pencil, computer, etc.) but we were only able to manage two. But they were a solid two!

Ix'Nal is once again acting as dialogue monitor, working with Marie and Valerie to finalize the scripts and then translate them to Kaqchikel. She even played the part of the teacher in today's production. My only regret in not finishing the third portion of the script is having to return to that same room and set it up again identically to today. Not impossible - we documented the position of each piece of equipment, furniture and prop - but certainly an ordeal. Unfortunately, our time with the talent was over so they had to leave. And we will return to our imaginary classroom again on Monday.

After packing up and grabbing lunch, we wondered into the real Panajachel - or at least that part not oft traversed by tourists. We're scouting images for another module we'll be producing for this trip - town locations. We were on the lookout for schools, banks, churches, city hall, etc. Found a lot of them. We'll go back this weekend with the HD camera and shoot them to video.

Had a chance to shoot a few more clips with the Flip camera. This is the view outside our rooms. Note the extreme pixilization at the start - this is because I opted to use the zoom function, which really isn't a zoom at all - it just magnifies the existing pixels. Must. Resist. Urge. To. Zoom. On the other hand, it does a nice job of picking up the voice of the operator (me). Makes a self-narrated clip a breeze. We'll keep testing it while we're here.

One other item of note: don't know how I've been able to live this long without knowing that I can have - simply by dropping by the corner store - my very own can of genuine, 100% gorilla snot. I kid you not.*

* Valerie tells me it's just hair gel. No real gorillas were used in the manufacture of this product.