Mercyworks
Coban, Guatemala
Overview
MercyWorks, an initiative of Missionhurst, is a charity that works with impoverished communities around the world to provide food, education, and medical care. Our team created a variety of video, photo, and written content to raise funds and spread awareness by telling the stories of those communities.
My Credits:
Associate Producer
Production Lead
Camera
Editor
Our primary goal was to collect as much raw content as possible while in Guatemala, where MercyWorks had a number of aid facilities. We wanted to capture video and photos of the villages and the people who lived there, as well as cover the work that MercyWorks was doing in the communities.
Pre-Production
Production
For this project, I was one of a two-person team and traveled to Coban, Guatemala City, and San Benito to visit a few of their aid centers. Getting to each of the sites was its own adventure. Some were hidden in dense forests, while others were on mountains with steep trails leading to the site. Even for the ones we could easily drive to, we often had to hold on tight in the bed of a pickup as our guides drove us through winding rural roads.
We tried to travel as lightly as we could, but we still brought too much for the overgrown mountain trails. We packed two cameras, a few lenses, a tripod, a monopod, a glidecam for tracking shots, a drone to capture aerial footage, and a couple of battery LED panels for capturing interviews.
One of the main videos we put together while on the trip was an evergreen overview video of MercyWorks, narrated by the director of the program. After writing a script, we filmed him with the best set-up we could muster using our travel kit.
Traveling through the small villages meant we had an incredibly authentic experience of the region. From eating fresh handmade tortillas to finding a tarantula under my bag, we were able to see and experience so many aspects of Guatemalan culture that helped shape our approach to this project.
In all, we captured just under 10 hours of footage: over eight hours of b-roll alone and around two hours of interviews. One of the biggest challenges was that the interviews were conducted in Spanish. Wishing I had paid a bit more attention in high school Spanish and with a lot of help from the MercyWorks team and Google Translate, I was slowly able to edit them into supplemental content.
The main video I delivered was the evergreen overview, which combined footage from across our entire trip and footage the client had previously filmed, to create a compelling video that is still one of my favorite videos I’ve produced.
Post-Production
RESULTS
Going into this project, we didn’t know exactly what kind of content we would come out with. In the end, we delivered 16 video assets to the client, ranging from interview vignettes, to thank you videos and the evergreen showcase featured above. The videos we delivered played a key role in MercyWorks’ marketing, fundraising, and awareness efforts.
