So the Grubstreet gal has a very smart buddy, Andrew Mogridge, with whom I have collaborated on a three-minute documentary about Enon, a little-known village near Kirkwood in the Eastern Cape that started life as a  Moravian mission station in 1816.

I came across the little village while I was on the Daily Dispatch @Venture project last year and was struck by the neat but quite poor little village in the back of beyond (it’s on the way to nowhere in particular), its beautiful Moravian church and the fact that it has a brass band, a hallmark of the Moravian church service. The people of Enon were the original farm workers on the citrus farms of the area and, indeed, still do itinerant labour on these farms.

But time was pressing and the @Venture team I was leading had a date to ride elephants in the Zuurberg Mountains in the nearby Greater Addo National Park.

I’ve always regretted not being able to spend more time in Enon and when Andrew Mogridge and his savvy team of web designers at Mogridge Design in East London, mentioned they wanted to experiment with video and making doccies, Enon sprang to mind.

And so Andrew and a couple his fellow band members (he’s also a talented musician and fine artist), who are fluent in Afrikaans, headed off to Enon for a weekend and interviewed the Enon pastor, Rev  Heflin Houlie, and some of villagers. They also filmed them singing and playing music. We realised that this is a remarkable little community, which has survived against the odds, and what holds it together is a love of music and the church, which is in daily use.

Andrew did some very elegant editing and I contributed to the framing of the story. Attention spans being so short on the web, we decided to make it three minutes in length, which turned out to be a real challenge. Three minutes is not very long  when you want to tell a story in film and you’ve got hours of footage from which to choose.

Andrew and I also argued over one point. I was adamant that the doccie needed a voice over. It was the news hack in me. How can we tell a story without words? Andrew (being an artist at heart) didn’t want a voice over and felt the music and editing itself could tell the story. Well, blow me down, he came up with a rough edit  and it worked! Brilliantly, if I say so myself!

So here it is. A first venture into the world of film and video. WATCH THIS SPACE AS THERE WILL BE MORE! We’d love to hear your comments, dislikes and likes, and any advice you might have.  We’ve also entered it into a Channel 4 (the British TV channel) competition called “3 Minute Wonder” for three-minute doccies so if the spirit moves you, we’d love you to vote for “Enon – A place of song” here. Enjoy!

Click here to go to Mogridge Design (which also gives Grubstreet free office space, bless them) to see what else they do, including Andrew’s art and his band’s music.

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