I love the great outdoors and, besides filming and photography, one of my main interests is the environment; how we affect it, and how it affects us. This interest led me to take myself back to university, studying a master’s degree in environmental technology at Imperial College London. As well as learning an awful lot of interesting things, I met an awful lot of interesting people. One of those people was Sergiu Jiduc.
Sergiu is a Romanian geo-scientist and explorer who always seems to be working on an interesting project. The latest of these is the Karakoram Anomaly Project, based in the mountains of northern Pakistan and supported by National Geographic. The project aims to better understand glacial lake outburst floods, sometimes called ‘mountain tsunamis’, and to help the communities of the Karakoram mountains protect themselves from these potentially catastrophic glacial floods.
Sergiu came to me with almost 11 hours of footage from a previous trip to Pakistan, and the aim of making a three to four minute video explaining the Karakoram Anomaly Project and its aims. The topic itself is quite complex so producing something short but coherent was quite tricky. We scripted Sergiu’s piece-to-camera, using him as a narrator to outline the project, while footage from Pakistan was used to breathe life into his explanation. I also made a simple animation to help explain how these mountain tsunamis come about.
To find out more about the Karakoram Anomaly Project, visit the website (which I also happened to build!) at karakoramproject.com.