Our first big screening of the film was with the senior showcase in May 2020. The next step for the film was to submit to a variety of film festivals. We got some great news from the 15 minutes of Fame Festival. 15 Minutes of Fame is a Film Festival based out of Florida, and is a collection of films produced anywhere in the United States or Canada that are under 15 minutes in length. Submitted films were viewed by a panel of five judges and the highest scores became official selections. We got our Official Selection notification at the end of October. It is with great anticipation that we look forward to the digital screening of the festival that runs for the month of December. We are one of two documentaries being screened.
When I first had the idea to travel with Caring Hands Africa and make a documentary about the work that they are doing, I knew it would be an expensive trip. Traveling this far and for this long was a new experience for me so I didnt even know how to begin to start thinking about budget. I brought the idea up to my roommates as we tried to put together a budget and ended up with a budget of roughly $8,000, little did I know that that would so far from what it truly costs. We continued working the budget through the preproduction process and we found that every time we worked on it, the total continued to increase. At the end of the semester we finished with a budget that rounds up to $20,000. And holy cow, that is a lot of money, especially for a college student.
From the beginning it was had to figure out what gear we would take. There are so many different factors we needed to consider such as would the school let us take the gear since we were looking to use a school camera, would it hold up well in the unknown conditions of Cameroon, does it record the formatting that we want to shoot in. After carefully considering these and many other factors, we came together with a final listing of gear to take. I just wanted to take a quick moment to tell you what gear we decided to take and why we went with it.
Since I started moving forward with things, it feels like there has been meeting after meeting. Had the first meeting with my producer to get things moving. It felt great to have someone else commit to helping work things through at this stage. We started working through potential crews and direction of the film. I have to say that I really am super excited for this project. I am really terrified as to how everything might come together, but I have faith that it will all work out.
This could be the biggest project I have ever dreamed of. And bigger than anything that I have seen done by my peers. But there are so many details, is it even possible? I have always wanted to use my passion for video production to help other people, working with the church, creating videos for nonprofits, or working on documentary work. As I have been working through the first years of college I have been able to develop my skills. I have been able to use work on projects like the documentary I made for the Baltimore Humane Society to be shown at their Black Tie Gala fundraiser, the documentary celebrating the 25th anniversary of the work Civic Works is doing in Baltimore, MD, and the doc highlighting a rising Baltimore musician.