They call me King Kim, but my name is Kimonge Conold. My parents died when I was six months old and I grew up with my grandfather. He called me Kimonge after a Kenyan friend of his. He loved Kiswahili. There were six of us in his home and he did not have enough money to educate all of us. I’m the only one who studied up to senior six. The others dropped out because they were not creative. For me, I am very creative. That is why I chose this title. To pay for my school, I could catch mud fish and sell, and I even rode a boda boda. While in secondary school, I loved drama very much. I was elected the entertainment prefect, even though I was a day-scholar and yet only boarders could become prefects. Unfortunately, after senior six, I could not afford to continue school. I used my creativity to start up a studio, and I made money by filming people’s weddings and other events. I always thought I would be the first person to start making films in Kabale, but was surprised when I saw posters calling for people to apply to Mobile Film School, and I was even more surprised to learn that there are other people who are already making films in Kabale.
I taught myself everything I knew about cameras and editing, and I believed I was a professional. When I came to this training, I thought I was only going to add a little bit of what I knew, mostly on the side of turning stories into films, but then I discovered that I knew nothing. Like with equipment, I once saved up money and bought a camera for two million shillings to help me in my work. Now that I’ve learned about cameras, I know I was cheated. They sold me a very old camera which uses tapes – yes, that outdated technology – and it kept breaking down. If I had the knowledge that I have now, I would know what specifications to look out for in a camera and I would not have thrown away all my savings on an old piece of scrap.
I lost all this equipment shortly after the training. Heavy rains fell in Kabale and there were floods in my suburb. I returned home one day and found water had destroyed my computer and camera and all other equipment. Maybe it was God’s way of making me start afresh, maybe God was telling me to stop using those outdated equipment, and this time when I start to rebuild, I’ll know the right kind of equipment to buy.
One thing that I appreciate from this training is the high quality of films that we made using mobile phones. When we showed the movies in the video halls around Kabale town, people kept asking us which camera we used for filming, because the picture is so clear and also the audio is not like the bad audio they are used to hearing in Kabale movies. They could not guess that we had used mobile phones. The only challenge is that they wanted long films, yet we made for them short films of under five minutes each. This challenge gives us motivation, and it gave me a good business idea. I’m the chairperson of a youth group. You know the government gives money to youths to start income generating activates, and I have been part of several groups before, mostly we form them for farming or business activities. We have never thought of a group focusing on film or media production. Now seeing the reaction of people in Kabale, I think if we formed a group and made good quality long films there will be a market and we shall make some money.
My only fear is that it takes a lot of time to produce good quality work. In the past, I would charge people little money to film their weddings, and I would edit it within one day and give it to them like that. Of course, the quality would be bad. There are camera shakes and all sorts of unforgivable mistakes when filming a live event. Now that I have a bit of knowledge, I want to give clients only very good quality. Even when filming a wedding, I want to take the shots from the best angle, with the best composition, and I’ve discovered that this is not always practical. It takes time, and this means I have to charge clients more, but when I do that, they simply look for a cheaper alternative. I don’t know what to do because with what I’ve learned, I want to produce good quality videos, but I’m afraid that if I focus on quality, I will end up charging clients too much and then I’ll lose a livelihood.