Happy Australia Day!
This morning we were eager to dig in to the vegemite, sao crackers and iced vovos we have been hoarding for the occasion. Belatedly, we realised that India day and Australia day fall on the same date - how appropriate! We took advantage of the empty office to make a mess of the kitchen as we cooked a huge batch of pancakes. Thank goodness Manju, the cook, is not here to see us or we might have to excuse our mess by convincing her that Australian cooking rituals involve splashing flour over the bench tops and our faces. No...we haven’t lied about Australian traditions to explain our quirky behaviour before - what are you talking about!
At the moment we are having a great time producing short videos documenting FEGG’s work for the website. Over the past few weeks, Claire has been surreptitiously gathering footage from around Bali. It is easy to capture great film from the safety of an auto-rickshaw (although the bumps don’t help much) but when we are standing amongst the action, it starts to feel a little awkward. We even found ourselves coaching people into a rickshaw yesterday for the sake of the camera and cheering aloud when we captured the footage we needed – a tad unprofessional. We were amused to find that people froze for a photo not realising that the camera took moving pictures, resulting in some hilarious footage of families arranging themselves in a pose and waiting for the click. Because Claire was trying to capture ‘natural’ scenes she was ironically stumped when she needed a clip to illustrate the strange looks we get in the street. Maybe we’re more foreign than the camera! While Claire painstakingly sorted through hours of footage on her precious Mac, ‘Evie’, Amelia got stuck in to writing the voice-over scripts on her stodgy PC, ‘Alfie’ (updates on this blooming romance will follow due to popular demand).
The voice-over scripts proved to take up quite a bit of our time. We practiced them endlessly repeating the passages slowly and with lots of expression, reminding each other to articulate ev-er-y syll-a-ble. After many a recording of both our voices, we tried to choose which one was best. After a rally of “I can’t decide – I think they’re both good?!” we settled on Claire’s dulcet tones.
Apart from our vanity regarding voice quality, one of the biggest challenges lay in recording the voice-overs without the background chorus of parrots, chai-wallahs calling out their wares, children playing in the street, motorcycles, Manju cooking dhal in the pressure steamer or Amelia yawning and bursting into giggles. Thankfully they’re done now and Claire has settled down into editing. Amelia then set her sights on writing up the stories of the girls who had been interviewed. While compiling the data, she shared snippets of the girls’ lives: a sober note to remind us of why FEGG, and in turn 2 Australian students, work here in Rajasthan. It is important that we never forget those girls who are the real reason that organisations like FEGG exist.
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