The year 2020 has been unpredictable, with dramatic impacts on every sector of the economy, both at a global and local level. Having been based in Nairobi for two years, I considered as normal to travel all over East-Africa to document projects, and to create innovative multimedia contents.

However, even before COVID-19, new tendencies were perceivable in the multimedia production industry, involving less and less travel, thus for three reasons:

1) An environmental reason: any travels, mostly by planes, have an environmental impact. A collective effort can be perceived, mostly among the young generation, to reduce our carbon footprint, and therefore it is obvious that multimedia production industry needs to reconsider its travel frequency.

2) A social reason: Talented photographers, videographers and local multimedia production companies can be found in any country. Nowadays, with affordable digital equipment available worldwide and access to online knowledge platform, it has never been that easy to find great partners with whom to collaborate. African visual storytellers are often the most suitable to tell the story, which makes the difference. When it comes to doing a shooting abroad, why not giving a chance to local crew, rather than flying over some replaceable technicians?

3) An economic reason: By outsourcing the shooting to local photographers, videographers, and multimedia production companies, it reduces the production and logistic costs and makes the offer more competitive for the clients.

By focusing on pre-production and editing/post-production, it also removes the travelling part, which can be the most tiring part of an assignment.

As visual storytellers, we obviously want to shoot photos, videos and to interview the characters of our stories. By reducing our travels, we can also be more efficient in the pre-prod and post-prod and focus more on our own personal projects at a local level.

Lambert – Founder of Transborder Communication