YAHOO!: RICHARD BANGS ADVENTURES: RWANDA

PROJECT:  One of the 1st original content initiatives for internet giant Yahoo! Richard Bangs Adventures dispatched a team of media pros to far away places to write, shoot, edit, record and bring those experiences to life in near real-time. The Managing Editor, Christian Kallen, has a great summary of this program and all the episodes.

MY ROLE: Producer, Cinematographer, Director

EPISODE NOTES: Richard Bangs and company made our next destination the cloud forests of Africa, trekking into the mountains to meet the mountain gorilla – and taking along actress Daryl Hannah for the journey. But Expedition Rwanda wasn’t just about the “charismatic megafauna,” but the remarkable turn-around in Rwanda’s national self-sufficiency in the wake of its tragic civil war of the mid-1990s. So we undertook a new kind of mission, based on what we came to call “adventure with a purpose” – to seek out stories of people who work consciously to improve their lot, and the world as a whole. (In association with the Gorilla Organization >>.) These clips were deliver over a low-bandwidth satellite connection from the middle of the Rwandan jungles and the video compression was quite severe.

PRODUCTION NOTES: One of the goals of Richard Bangs Adventures on Yahoo! was to bring a sense rawness and immediacy to our audience of armchair adventurers. We did this by delivering at least one webisode (and in many cases 2 or 3) per day. The idea was that the audience would return each day to the site; essentially following along the adventure. This deliverable schedule required a well oiled field production machine consisting of producing, shooting, and editing within extremely short time frames. Turnaround time from from rolling the cameras to delivering a finished piece was anywhere from 4-12 hours depending on how much hiking, driving, swimming…etc…

Daryl Hannah Searches for Mountain Gorillas from Didrik Johnck on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at . It is filed under Featured Work, Site Content Development, Social Media, Yahoo!: Richard Bands Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.