It’s been a busy past few months with no hint of letting down anytime soon. Here’s a recap of what’s been happening and what’s coming up.
Haiti – I’m returning to Haiti to help out on an exciting short documentary project. It’s about the vanishing art of Haitian Machete Fencing, a fighting style that originated during the Haitian revolution. It will be a very stylish doc with lots of slow motion shots. You can find out more about the project and help support it (more crowdfunding requests!) at the GoFundMe page.
RISC Battlefield Medical Training – In June I was fortunate enough to take the RISC training course. RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues) is a four day first aid course for treating battlefield wounds. It was created by photojournalist Sebastian Junger, after his friend Tim Hetherington and fellow photojournalist Chris Hondros were killed in Libya (Sebastian and Tim directed the documentary Restrepo). There is very little training available to freelance journalists, and most of it is thousands of dollars as it’s targeted more towards business professionals or reporters for a major news agency. RISC was created to teach journalists how to treat life threatening wounds, and best of all it’s entirely free.
It was an amazing course run but some excellent individuals. I was surprised at how much I learned in only four days. And with this upcoming shoot of machete wielding fighters it’s knowledge I’m glad I have.
Because it’s free, I’m trying to pay it forward for future classes to help support them. Please consider donating a few dollars on my donation page. Donate to RISC.
Foundation Shoot – I’ve been traveling around the US the past six weeks shooting a video for a foundation highlighting their grant recipients. I’ve been traveling as a one man band and have fine tuned my kit to be travel friendly and moveable by one person (though my back might disagree). I’ll write a full post of what I’ve been using and some travel tricks I’ve found.
I’ll go into more detail about everything soon, but that’s it for now. You can always follow me on Instagram at @C47Joe.
