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SHOOTING On January 14, 2001 at 6:30am, the production crew and the dance group met at TV-3 studios. From there, a vanload of musicians and dancers drove in caravan with a large truck carrying most of a video production studio's worth of equipment. For the next hour, we made our way through Accra's morning rush hour, driving out of the urban area into the hilly farmland of Medea, finally arriving at Bernard Woma's Dagara Music Center school of traditional African music. In another hour, the truck was unloaded, and the Dagara Music Center guest house was transformed into a production studio. Outside, encircling the concrete dancing ring, each of the three cameramen operated a Betacam, equipped with tripod and talkback headphone/microphone to communicate with the director inside the guest house. Camera signals were monitored on three portable rack-mounted television screens. Michael Omari Gyimah mixed the shots as directed, and Alfred Kwaku Boamah managed the signal level and color balance of each camera while Eddie Acklah controlled the recording deck. Joseph Adzeman engineered the audio recording, mixing SM-58s close-miking the xylophones and kuar drum, balanced with a single ambiant boom mike. Extra-long power cables were used to keep the two gasoline-powered electricity generators out of audio range, behind the house. Special thanks go to Ben Clottey, TV-3's much-loved senior technical producer, pictured giving the thumbs-up in the image on the left. After warming up the dancers and pouring sacred libation of pito (the Dagara traditional fermented millet brew), Bernard Woma and the musicians took their positions and the recording commenced. Most songs were shot in one take, after which the performers would change their costumes amid shouts of "More pito!" from the musicians. Shooting began at 10:30am and continued until around 2:30pm. The dancers and musicians had performed brilliantly during the hottest part of the day, and the crew was eager to pack up and head for home. Equipment breakdown finished in under an hour, and the TV-3 truck rolled away, filled with equipment and crew waving goodbye and laughingly calling for more pito. "More pito!" was a running joke among the production crew for weeks afterward. POST-PRODUCTION Because the video was mixed live, post-production editing requirements were minimal, involving minor edits, adding titles, and rearranging the order of the songs. Challenges arose in the search for an editing facility that could handle this long-form program in a digital editing environment. The first editing experience, using an outdated Avid system on a Mac Quadra 900, resulted in an unusable master. In order to digitize an hour of footage, the video editor digitized the footage with too much compression. The director didn't notice this as the video monitor was badly in need of repair. The resulting master was virtually unwatchable. The lesson: don't settle without exploring all the options first. C'est la vie. The second attempt at editing was fruitful. More extensive searching through Accra's video production community uncovered Nankani Electronic Image in Asylum Down, running Adobe Premier on a Mac G4 and DVCAM digital tape. Kishore Nankani, proprietor, was generous with his time and equipment. After another day of editing, the DVCAM/PAL master was ready for duplication. DUPLICATION Accra has numerous small-run VHS-to-VHS duplicating shops, but as of early 2001, duplicating larger quantities from BetacamSP or DVCAM was simply not available. In the interest of keeping the duplication process inside Ghana, we bumped down to SVHS and made fifty VHS/PAL copies at the TV-3 dubbing facility. Dubbing was a surprisingly arduous task, but the staff at TV-3 are to be commended for their willingness to make a difficult situation end with a successful outcome. PACKAGING Although Accra has plentiful high-volume, four-color printing services, the initial duplication run was small, just fifty copies for the domestic Ghanaian market. Thus, we opted to use inkjet printing for the packaging. Given this limiting print medium, we obtained surprisingly good results from Spectrum 3 Ltd. Thanks to Frank Arthur, managing director, for his outstanding generosity, service and attention to detail. RELEASE The first fifty tapes were produced entirely in Ghana, and were released to the domestic market in March, 2001, at a rehearsal of the Dagara Bewaa Culture group in the Mamobi neighborhood of Accra. POST-POST For the US market, the master was converted to NTSC format. HAVE, Inc. provided a flawless job in the standards conversion and first run of VHS/NTSC duplications. Additional minor edits were performed at IShow.com in Seattle, and Paragon Media handled the second duplication run. All duplications for the US market have been from digital DVCAM, direct to VHS, resulting in exceptional video and audio clarity. Thanks to IShow.com for providing the use of their digital video workstations for encoding the video clips for this web site. For any production-related questions, you are welcome to contact us.
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