Film Crew Visit to Laos

Recently, Pencils of Promise hired a film company, Deltree, to come to Laos to create a short film to be featured at their annual Gala in October.  It is not a documentary, but more an artistic piece of work to show how the education of youth can impact their communities and to demonstrate the PoP mission that “Everyone has a promise”.

I was so pumped! Not only was a film crew coming to Laos, but I was assigned as the point person for Deltree and I would help organize what village we would film, who would be in the film, and any other logistics.  I’ve never worked on a film before and so I was excited for the challenge! I collaborated with my Laos managers to narrow our options down to two good schools/villages for the film (Hat Khang and Boum Lao) and also pre-select a few students who would not be camera shy.  This was no small feat as there are 40+ schools in Laos, all varying distances from our office and all with vastly different settings (mountain views vs river views vs rice field views, thatch houses vs cement houses, dirt roads vs paved roads, etc). And as we had no idea what the film crew was envisioning, we had to come up with a few different options.

Deltree had two people come (Ben and Abby) and we also had Lauren join us from the New York office to help guide the PoP vision for the film. After brainstorming ideas on Thursday, we headed to the field Friday morning to scout schools, villages, and start working with the kids.  Specifically, to see if the kids followed instructions well and if they would get shy with people watching, we worked with about 30 kids and asked them to do various silly tasks.

1) sit with a notebook and when we said HIT1 you write in the notebook, HIT2 you look up at this tree and smile (or think of something sad), HIT3 you continue writing

2) run to a water bottle excited because its an iPhone! Yell to your friends that you found an iPhone!

3) run to a water bottle and you’re sad because its your dog that was hit by a car

Pretty morbid I know, but these different tasks would show if the kids could follow instructions and whether or not they understood what we were trying to accomplish.  The hardest part was that Deltree had to communicate to one of the Laos PoP Staff their vision, then the staff had to translate to Lao for the kids. Much more difficult than the director being able to explain what he wants directly to the actors.  After visiting both pre-selected villages, interviewing the kids and seeing the school, Deltree decided to do all filming in the Hat Khang village and have three main actors.  Luni, Phanh, and Suk were the three main kids to act and they were ages 10-13.

Once we decided on the village and the students, we had to come up with a story board.  Like I explained above, the overall point of the movie is to showcase PoP’s main belief of “Everyone has a Promise” and how the educated kids can help their communities in the future, even in very small ways.  After several hours in the PoP office on Saturday, we decided to focus on small lessons in the classroom that are based off of the government curriculum actually taught in school, and how those lessons translate to their everyday lives.  For example, one lesson would be reading and writing in Lao, and they can use that knowledge to read a prescription for their grandfather as many elders do not know how to read and write.  We came up with a list of about 15 different school lessons and how that lesson could be shown in the village.  It was a fun challenge as we wanted it to be as real and plausible as possible, and had to piece together the information that various staff members contributed.

We started filming on Sunday and filmed every day through Wednesday.  We soon found out that we needed the same light every one of those days, and as sunset and sunrise have the best lighting, we were up at 4:30 and at the village before sunrise. We also had to stay through sunset, so these were some pretty long, hot days in the sun.  On the plus side, I saw amazing views of the mountains and early morning village life in Laos. 

Boys throwing their fishing net in the river and then hitting the water to get the fish to swim into their net

During the filming process, it was really interesting to see how a film crew works and how intense it was for a such a small film and what it must be like for a crazy big Hollywood film.  To see Ben (the director) think through what shot he wants to see, Abby working with the kids despite the language barrier, and the local kids and village members dropping their day to day work to be involved in the film - priceless.  

Ben working with the man we used as the father in the film

Ben working with Luni during a scene that had her writing in her notebook

The beginning days of planning and organizing were really fun for me, but the time in the field was more difficult and boring than I was anticipating.  Once my initial curiosity and amazement wore off, I got bored. Mostly because I didn’t really have a role once we were filming and so there was a lot of sitting around for 12-14 hours.  I was given the task of sound, which initially sounded really cool (no pun intended) and I was pumped about it at first, but since this movie was mostly going to just have background music and not too much dialogue and we were running short of working batteries, I could only do sound when they weren’t filming.  Aka - a few minutes of sound for a full day of filming. I did get to wear headphones and carry around the stick with the fuzzy microphone at the end – but obviously I did not learn the professional lingo.

Overall, I’m glad I was involved to see what goes into producing a film like this, and I cannot wait to see the final film! We are hoping that when we get a downloaded version of the final film after the Gala, to go back into the village to showcase the film on a projector for the whole village to see.  The three little kids who were the stars of the film had to do 20+ takes on any one scene and were getting worn out by the end of filming, so I hope that when they see the final product that they will be glad they participated and proud of what they accomplished.