rlord reports

by Alyce Henson

In March I was sent on assignment to Uganda, ground zero in the history of HIV/AIDS. It also has experienced over 20 years of civil war. In preparation for the trip I had watched many interviews of Ugandan children telling how they had become orphans through disease or war. Then I saw performance videos of the Bitone children from the Bitone Project at Center for Disadvantaged Children near Kampala, I began to see the possibility to tell a war torn story in a different way.

Before departing, I shared my impression of the Bitone Project with the Creative Director of The Rotarian Magazine, Deborah Lawrence. She was very excited about my opportunity to photograph Ugandan children doing traditional dance. I was pretty excited myself; I was already previsualizing pure joy, smiling faces, positive energy, inspiration, pride, and confident young people. She threw out some ideas: make it more graphic, portraits but dancing, motion blur.

It wasn't until I was actually shooting that I started to think about the possibility of these dance sequences being turned into a multimedia piece. Luckily, the video sound engineer Nick Clemente wanted to gather audio footage of the musicians, so as soon as I noticed him doing it I asked him to continue throughout the shoot. It really made the piece so much stronger to have the actual audio instead of trying to match a piece of music to the dancers. I had the camera set on continuous, in order to capture the succession of the dancers.

I was so full of joy to see how happy they were when dancing and performing. It was an outstanding example of the importance of culture and the arts in the lives of young people and how it can give a person something positive to focus on -- no matter one's hardship. Almost all the kids talked about how dancing took their troubles away. What a gift, I thought.

When we returned to the office I did a quick edit of images to share with my colleagues. There were about 175 images from the entire trip and I put them into a slideshow. As we incorporate more multimedia into our website and The Rotarian Video Magazine (RVM), the presentation was a good opportunity to demonstrate new ways to deliver images. The next step was to work with Photo Coordinator, Miriam Doan, who creates our multimedia presentations. I gave her a selection of the dancing images and the audio files. Miriam paired the field recordings with images and wrote some brief text. The piece was such a success that it was posted immediately on the web and it gave the Creative Director further inspiration to create a magazine photo essay.

It peaked interest in the lives of the children of Bitone Center, just as the kids were inspiring to me. I had hoped to create a quick visual message to intrigue others. Mission Accomplished, so turn up the volume and check it out at

http://www.rotary.org/en/MediaAndNews/News/Pages/090612_news_bitone.aspx

Alyce Henson (alyce.henson@rotary.org) is a Staff Photographer for Rotary International.