In the run-up to this year’s Geek Retreat, Elodie Kleynhans of Blinktower and I hatched a plan – to make a three-minute movie that would explore the essence of geekdom and (we hoped) inspire young people to be geeky (by which we mean being curious, passionate, hands-on and building things). Between Elodie’s corporate video background and my desire to teach digital storytelling, we came up with an ambitious vision of teams of people rushing around the Stanford Valley scripting, filming and editing their own movies in three days.
The final product was of course very different, a negotiated outcome between us and awesome team members Jon Maliepaard, Larry Claasen and Luisa Mazinter; the process was frenetic, fluid and at times verging on chaotic, but nobody lost their tempers and we all had the wonderful experience of creating both a strong team and a great product out of nothing in three days. We started as strangers and finished as friends – thank you all!
Here’s the movie – far from perfect, but it does capture some of the essence of what the weekend was about:
And here are three of the other projects that came out of the weekend:
- Solve my F***ing Problem – a source of problems for entrepreneurs to solve.
- Bootstrap Secrets – a collection of start-up wisdom gained the hard way.
- Who offers SA’s fastest DSL service?
And here are some roundups of the whole weekend:
- Mariska du Preez: What a great way to start the year
- Heather Ford: What really happened – or did it?
I loved it, and learned from it. Thanks Heather and Jarred for organising it, and Elan Lohmann and Avusa for making it possible.
