08/16/2026
Greetings : Damien is a YDWPer he was on an internship with NEWF - Nature Environment & Wildlife Filmmakers , Damien will get to learn about filmmaking and story telling and most important he will be able to indulge in other cultures.
Youth Diving With A Purpose
SEA SCOPE INC
Our Genetic Legacy
Get Black Outside
Tennessee Aquatic Project
By Damien Davis , PT 2
Editing was described to me by Thuku–a NEWF fellow and very good editor–as the thing that decides what you see and when you see it in any type of digital media. He also said that editing, like many things in the filmmaking process, is excruciating to watch when it’s bad, and almost never noticed when it’s good, because everything flows together so naturally that your perception of it becomes fully unconscious. Now I won’t bore you with the nitty gritty details of how editing works but, I will say that editing is basically 80 percent file management and 20 percent actual editing.
The next skill I had to learn was underwater videography. This wasn’t totally foreign to me since I did know how to use a camera and make sure that footage was properly exposed and such, but what I did not know was how to prep and maintain an underwater camera housing. Turns out, a camera housing is just a very heavy and very expensive vacuum sealed box. And as long as you seal that box properly and rinse it with freshwater when you’re done, everything will be just fine. Hopefully.
The final skill I had to learn was sound recording which I learned from Nathan, another NEWF fellow who is helping produce a documentary on cheetahs in the game reserve near Ekhaya. From his lessons I had two main takeaways. The first is to always, always, always, test your equipment since sound equipment in particular is quite prone to breaking. And the second was that holding a boom mic might be the most physically demanding job one can have on a film set since you could be holding a big pole over your head for hours on end.
After what was about three weeks of learning and practicing I was able to begin production on my film. I wrote the story, rewrote the story, rewrote the script, did the shotlist, rewrote the script, then redid the shotlist again since I redid the script, and then finally shot the film. Then I reshot half of the film, because my footage from the second day of shooting was overexposed. But after all that I had finally shot my first film and I was left with a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of relief, and about 100 gigabytes of footage to cut together into something that resembles a coherent story.
Right now, I am back home and deep in the process of editing the first cut. It certainly won’t be perfect, and I wouldn’t say that I am an expert on any of the processes, but I’m getting through it and it will eventually be done. And no matter what, I will have learned more in this month at NEWF than I could have learned in a year on my own, and for that I am incredibly grateful. I’d like to thank (in no particular order) my parents, Noel, Mr. Stewart, Rabiah, Pragna, Asier, Carlos, Thuku, Nkosi, Slie, Cebo, and the NEWF interns and staff for affording me such an opportunity. I won’t soon forget it.
NEWF - Nature Environment & Wildlife Filmmakers
