Documentary : The Lambani women.

NARROWING DOWN

After the first days' experience talking to the Lambani people and visiting their homes in the small village of Sushilanagar, we came up with various ways of approaching the documentary.

We could focus on a lot of things - their history, their culture, their work.

We decided to make our film about how the women of the tribe still wear their traditional heavily embroidered costumes and heavy silver jewellery everyday in a ritualistic way, because it was a custom that fascinated us.

RESEARCH

We understood how dressing up in their traditional wear would have a tourism value in the Centre where tourists might collect to see the Lambanis work. However, these women, especially the older ones, accustomed to "wear their wealth", ritualistically dress up for every day as they have been used to doing all their lives.

We found out that the Lambani style of embroidery was used to decorate a girl's dowry wear - and that the Lambani women are used to "wearing their wealth". And although their embroidery is now a livelihood and is used on various kinds of products from clothes to laptop cases and mobile phone holders, many of these women still continue their ritualistic dressing up every day.

LOCATION AND FOOTAGE

We went to the village of Sushilanagar to shoot our documentary - where we would find the older generation (all of whom practise this ritual and some of whom would have time to help us with our film).

And we shot our footage with some of these old ladies on the doorsteps of their houses, many stills and a few panoramic videos of the village and countryside. We were very interested in the way they tied their hair with silver ornaments and then braided it, looping it back over the shoulder.

A BIT OF PRE-PLANNING

Some photographs we had shot in the Centre on the 25th were of paintings on the red outer wall of the centre, painted by a local artist. These traditional paintings showed the Lambani dress and jewellery to perfection and we were reminded of the same while we were taking our videos and photographs and took parallel ones at the Centre and at the village to use as an introduction.

I was invited by these ladies to wear their costumes for a photoshoot and we had a good time while the Lambani women lovingly took off their own jewellery and brought out spare costumes to dress in and then posed with me for us. They were so welcoming and helpful that we were made to feel very much at home.

EDITING

We completed our editing and final post-production work on our short documentary that night when we returned from shooting. We worked on Movie Maker because we felt that the footage we had did not require too much of post-production work because we had shot it keeping in mind exactly how we wanted the sequences and the introduction and conclusion.