Will you fall in love with Burmese music?

Hi guys,

I'm here again. It seems a long time ago I published my first post. Since then as some of you know I've been to the BBC 2012 community reporters scheme to be trained one day a week over three weeks; to brainstorm the stories, for two production days and in the fourth week to make those ideas into short films in mid June. This training was a part of the London 2012 cultural Olympiad. 

The idea of how the World Service could contribute to communities in London was planted a year ago and we were lucky to be happy guinea pigs in this training. This was a good chance for us all to get a taste of the industry and see if the media is a career for us. There were four girls from Burmese community and the Chinese service brought eight young people as they belong to a much bigger community compared to minority Burmese. 

Burmese trainee reporters

London is so diverse with foreigners who came for the greener grass and as such is always lively with different cultures under the usual dull weather. These people have brought flavours, religions, cultures, life styles and the most important thing – amazing and exotic people to London. There are many untold unique stories in these communities and these are worth sharing with wider audiences. 

A Burmese spiritual dancer dancing

We were trained in story development, script writing, interviewing and camera skills by BBC Training department. My favourite topics were storytelling and script writing but my camera skills were so-so. We were provided editorial and technical assistance before and during production. Five short films were made in this scheme, two are from the Burmese community. 

I wanted to make a film about the Burmese migrant workers in Camden market but there were some strong reasons which stopped me to pen that script and tell that story, but one day I will find a way to make that documentary, when I have the help of some eager real-life actors! I therefore chose to document the visiting Burmese musicians and their exotic cultural music. This content is rich, unique and big enough for  a half hour long programme, so it was harsh to scale down into two minutes and something film. The title was decided to be ‘’How do you make London fall in love with Burmese music?’’.

The camera is pretty heavy

The world was the apple and the sky was the limit before meeting up with some conservative Burmese people who were unhappy with us taking the video of the preparation of the Burmese orchestra fundraising gig on our first production day. Those people gained the contract of shooting the official DVD for that gig and they thought that we would spread the video(s) around social networks before their DVDs were released. That nonsense idea is the least thing I would think. It was difficult to explain to those business people what we were actually doing and the situation was tense until the venerable monk negotiated between us. As a result we missed our chance to shoot the actual performance of musicians on the stage, but apart from that minor disruption, the monks and musicians were very helpful and were happy to repeat the interviews or replay the music when the retakes were needed. I am really grateful to these gentlemen.

My teammate Su Mon with our film editor Ron in editing stage

The visit of these musicians is important to the London Burmese community as the traditional instruments are always covered with alter cloths in the monastery unless the pros are in the town. They have performed a few gigs including Daw Suu’s encounter in the Royal Festival hall and BT River of Music in Battersea park to celebrate the cultural Olympiad.

So we've made our little film and I'll be posting the link when it is available online. I’m very delighted that I’ve done something beautiful for my community and adopted a new interest which is film making. :-)

Su Su