Results tagged “Video” from Intelligent Travel Blog

High school student Kyle Bullington traveled to Kenya this summer, where he lived and worked in the Nairobi neighborhood of Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, on a unique volunteer project.

Residents of Kibera watch a video created by the Carolina for Kibera team

This summer, high school student Kyle Bullington arrived in Kibera with a unique goal: To enable the youth in the community of one of the world's biggest slums to share their perspectives on life there through short video clips. "Most people around the world are blind to the sufferings of approximately a million people in this community," Kyle wrote in a piece for the Huffington Post. "I felt that the best means to depict the story of Kibera would be through video." Kyle worked to develop the video project with the group Carolina For Kibera, an NGO that works on public health and community development issues in the region. Noting that "the only footage that ever makes it out of Kibera is that which is taken by foreigners," Kyle arranged for Pure Digital and Apple to donate equipment for the project, and brought 10 Flip video cameras and two 24-inch iMacs to the slum. We asked him to give us an update on how the community is recording their stories.

Shortly after arriving in Kibera, I created a YouTube channel for the organization and began recording my story in the slum. I then trained a group of four locals involved in the organization to film and edit video. I posted eight YouTube videos during my two-week stay and then handed the channel over to my trained team to begin making their own posts. 

Since returning home, I have seen the group I trained continue to improve on their moviemaking abilities. They have been making monthly posts about different aspects of life in Kibera. They recently did a video with the Carolina For Kibera founder about morning life in Kibera. I hope that these videos will continue to gain exposure and enable Kiberans to create global awareness about slum life.

Check out one of the videos after the jump.

Every trip should have a soundtrack, so we've asked CJ Fahey with Nat Geo Music to select artists from their catalog whose songs will inspire you to get going.


It's no surprise that one of the sexiest videos we've got at Nat Geo Music is a tango-electronic song from the French-Argentine group Gotan Project; after all, tango got its start as a dance performed in brothels in Buenos Aires in the late 19th century and today is synonymous with romance.

"Diferente" by Gotan Project shows how you might find tango danced today in a Buenos Aires milonga. This video highlights two dances: the obvious one on the dance floor, and the implicit dance of stolen glances and budding romance between the featured (gorgeous) couple.

Tango has inspired poets and artists for generations. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has noted the passionate, almost combative interaction between dancers: "The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration." And tango legend Enrique Santos Discépolo touches on tango's inherent melancholy: "The Argentine tango is a sad thought that you can dance."

A trip to Buenos Aires is a trip to the heart of tango. If you go to Argentina, or for that matter Uruguay, pick up some records by contemporary tango groups like Gotan Project and Bajofondo, or legends like Astor Piazzolla and Carlos Gardel. And don't forget your dancing shoes.

[Video, Free Buenos Aires]

I'm a sucker for street art (see here), and this adorable video makes for a fun Friday afternoon distraction. Made by the husband-and-wife animation team at London Squared, it highlights the often overlooked "voices" in New York City. Enjoy and happy weekend!

[Rocketboom via Vvynyl]

Tomorrow, April 1st, at 10 pm the National Geographic Channel (NGC) will premiere the third season of its critically acclaimed series, Locked Up Abroad. In fourteen new episodes, they'll examine harrowing real-life stories of kidnapping, imprisonment, and other nightmares faced by travelers abroad.
   
We were lucky enough to preview an upcoming episode about an innocent victim of a drug trafficking scam in Peru. Briton Simon Burke haplessly went along with a new friend, Sarah Jackson, on what seemed like a dream trip to Machu Picchu. After ten days exploring Cusco and the Lost City of the Inca, he and Sarah were detained in Lima on their way back to the UK. Sarah was smuggling nearly ten kilos of cocaine to pay down a debt she'd dangerously accrued back home.
   
Both were imprisoned, he for ten months in a men's maximum security prison, packed with over 230 prisoners and only 56 beds. Finally, his companion pled guilty and attested to Simon's innocence. He was released from prison but the authorities did not return his passport. At the time of filming, Sarah was serving seven years for trafficking cocaine and Simon was still in Lima, in limbo, living in a tiny apartment while his status was sorted out.
   
Locked Up Abroad's travel horror tales are entertainingly shocking. But don't let these stories put you off traveling - the series teaches essential lessons as you plan your next overseas adventure. What Not To Do, after the jump.

It's a quiet afternoon here in the office, so I offer up a happy-distraction: The latest, and by far greatest, of the Matt Harding "Dancing" travel videos. If you're not up to speed on Matt's Travels, here's a quick recap. Harding grows up in Connecticut playing video games. He catches the travel bug while living in Australia, and begins shooting a little video of him dancing a silly jig wherever he goes. He eventually strings the clips together and sets them to music, and the first video becomes an internet phenomenon. Stride gum catches on, and sends him around the world - again - to shoot another. By now he's become an international dancing sensation. But he realizes that throughout his travels, he's been dancing alone. So he convinces Stride to foot the bill for another trip, only this time he reaches out to his many fans and invites them to dance alongside. The result is, quite simply, beautiful.

It's this video that the New York Times called "an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it's short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it's open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism." And last week World Hum named Harding their Traveler of the Year, calling the video "simple yet deeply touching...If there exists on YouTube a more powerful invocation to travel, and to reach out to others and make friends along the way, we haven't seen it."

Like I said, a happy distraction. Try not to get inspired, or misty-eyed even while watching.

Via World Hum | Video

As Geography Awareness Week kicks off, we love introducing a few people with an inspiring geographic attitude. Today we bring you the subject of National Geographic's Letter of the Week, six-year-old Ryan. He's so concerned about the plight of the earth, he was inspired to make his own film to instruct others how "to save the world." His mother writes:

My son Ryan receives National Geographic Kids every month and reads it over and over until it literally falls apart. I want to commend you on your magazine as it has expanded his view of life. He was always precocious and interested in animals, but now there is a marked difference. Now he wants to save the world. My son asked to make a video to teach people how to change the world and save the environment. I used my digital camera to help him.... Thank you for producing this magazine. It has changed our lives.

Ryan's video is chock full of information, and although I am not entirely sure how wearing a bike helmet can save the world, it's a pretty good tip anyway. His geography skills are also remarkably sharp: Notice how young Ryan correctly points out features like rainforests and the Himalayas on a globe. I was pretty impressed. Thanks Ryan, for inspiring people to care about conservation and geography!

Our friends over at National Geographic magazine have a terrific story in their September issue about Bolivian women wrestlers. In the mountaintop town of El Alto, these cholitas slam each other onto the mats while dressed in sequined petticoats and bowler hats. The piece, by Alma Guillermoprieto, explains that the fighting cholitas see themselves as symbols of strength: Their opponents include bigotry and sexism. "My goal," says one fighter, "is to lift up indigenous women, who have been treated with contempt." Check out the video slideshow of the women below.

Photos by Ivan Kashinsky