State Of The Nation Address

On the 11th of February 2010 our President JG Zuma gave us The State of the nation address and in the address he cover a lot of the common things and made some of the same promises that were made last year but out of the whole speech two things stood out for me and those things are the Increases in the social grant.

The social grant

The social grant was put into place to help the poor. For them to be able to provide themselves with basic needs for them to live by. But this was never meant to last forever it was meant to help the poor until they were able to get back on they own feet. A few years after the social grants were put into place people started complaining saying that the people that are getting these social grants were abusing it because they did not want to work any more but they were starting to depend on the government to give them everything and because of this train of thought it has inspired a lot of people to think in the same way. This year in the address Zuma says "To ensure a safety cushion for the poor we brought social grant increases forward and extended the child support grant to children over 14 years of age." This is helpful but I think more should be done.

Can't the government create a way to teach the young people that are taking the social grant a way to stand on they own to feet instead of throwing money at them?

people think about these things.

Amandla

Amandla A revolution in four part harmony. A winner in the Sundance Film Festival and personally an eye opener for anyone who is interested about the music from the liberation struggle (Apartheid era) e.g Meadowlands this is a song that most south Africans have come know but not truly understand its history and its part that it played in the South African history. This is one of the many songs that was sang by people who where being moved fromSophia town to a small controllable area called Meadowlands. Now a days we here the song and think that its a happy song because its lively but true and this is what this movie reviles to us. Amandla gives a deeper understanding in how and how much music was a catalyst to ending Apartheid in South Africa. When watching this movie in the beginning one many get a sense that this is going to talk about something we have all heard before but the more you watch the more you get griped by it because it shows us a different side to the Apartheid era that we knew was there just that it had not been visually brought to life. We get to see hear stories of how we black people expressed ourselves and fought back when it was tried to be taken away from us.

Amandla awetu

(power its ours)

My First Movie Maybe My Last

This year i got a chance to make a documentary for the Durban Film Fest. This was my first time making any kind of film that was going to be viewed by other people other than my family because i'm only use to recording family events. I was excited and i was looking forward to doing this ever since i heard about it at the start of the year. i was not there the day we got the brife and the day that groups were picked but i was in a group with Sanle Naomi and lu and they had picked to do Classical. I wouldn't have picked it but since i was not there i had no say in the matter. I as soon as i found out ideas started popping up in my mind of how i would like it to look but i couldn't have it my because i was in a group so i needed to hear the others ideas and then share mine but then we said that the final layout would be chosen later on. We moved onto the research which we all did. Now it was time to get people interview and lucky for me I knew someone who teaches music and she was very much into her classical music. Mrs Pat Stead was her name and she was my old school music teacher from VCA a school in Durban North. She gave us some insight. Now it was almost time to start shooting and the most unlike thing happened my loving mother forced me to take a week off and rest because she could see that i was stressed out and about to brake down because there were so many things that still needed to be done. During that week i kept in contact with the group but there were not happy with the fact that i wasn't coming in but i was still able to do my part. when i got back i needed to get back on the ball because i a few days time we had to show our finding. We showed our findings and we found out that we still needed to do more research but there was no time so we were forced to split the work Lu and Naomi would do more research Sanle would do the poster and the dvd cover and I would carry on trying to find more interviews. Shooting day came and i asked Naomi to accompany me to do the shoot so she can ask the questions and i would work with the camera and since we were using our own camera we had more shooting days than the other groups al the shooting days were fine beside for the one were Naomi and Lu showed up drunk. I wanted to kill them but thankfully i didn't because i need them and luckily the shoot was outside so no one could smell them. The time for editing and the troubles that come with it had come we struggled to get the Videos into the Macs so i found a friend of mine that had editing software on his computer but i knew that i had to find a way to get it onto the Macs because if didn't we would never finish in time. After a week I was able to find a way to get the Videos on to the Macs with the help of my teacher for Vega but we only had a week to edit so the final layout had to be chosen right there and than. we finished editing the morning of show day. We went and watched our movies go up and i started noticing mistakes that we had over looking and we paid the price for it. but for whats worth i had fun and i enjoyed doing it and maybe in a few years time i would try again.