I’ve been planning this project on and off during the later half of last year (yes, THAT year of 2020) and am finally in a position to announce that I am now in pre-production to create ‘Fiji B.C.‘, a 4 part video podcast series that takes a deep dive into the Fiji of old.

Last year I was doing some research into ancient Fiji and its lore. I was reading whatever scanned PDFs of colonial explorer diaries I could get my hands on, as well sitting down several times with Mr Sevudredre of the Ministry of iTaukei Affairs. He’s the Principal Cultural Officer and a man well-versed with ancient Fiji history and lore. It was during the many meetings with him that I learnt a lot of fascinating aspects of Fiji that I otherwise would never have learned elsewhere. As I absorbed interesting fact after interesting fact, it dawned on me that other people, definitely other iTaukei folks like me, who’ve had near-zero exposure to information such as this, would gladly love to listen and learn from Mr Sevudredre as well.

So, with the thumbs up from Mr Sevudredre, the gracious sponsorship of Mana Coffee Fiji, who’ve given a room and some kava for the show, as well as with the support from Dave Lavaki of First Fighter, who has sponsored his sound, lighting and camera equipment for the shoot, we’re finally on track to create ‘Fiji B.C.‘, a 4 part video podcast series that will go into production sometime next week and will screen in February on my Youtube channel (which at the moment is currently bare, but we’ll fix that soon enough) as well as on Facebook.

What will the show be like? Well for starters, this is a personal project, not beholden to anyone else, so right off the bat we’re going casual. I’m on a path of discovery and Mr Sevudredre will be the captain of the ship of knowledge. We will be sitting down with a basin of kava and having a chit chat about aspects of ancient Fiji that are of great interest. To help keep the show on track, we’ll keep each episode around a certain topic, such as (TBC) warfare, society and its roles, arts and music etc. More on that after we’ve nailed it down in our pre-production meetings. Also I may have signed my death warrant with this show as I’m supposed to drink kava while on camera. I’m not a big kava drinker and I tend to make sour faces whenever I take my drink. So this’ll be fun in more ways than one.

Finally, why am I doing this? As I’ve mentioned before, I want to try my hand at film production and this seems to be a good introduction to the scene – directing, acting, editing, dealing with sponsors, writing a press release (actually this isn’t a press release but just go with it), that kinda thing. Since this isn’t a paid job or meant for TV, I am (sorta) free to make (hopefully small) mistakes and learn by doing.

Let’s see how we go, shall we?