Sixth-former extraordinaire Mikhail Gibbings is the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Innovation Prize winner in its Caribbean Youth-IN Video Mix Competition 2012. Gibbings, 16, is a student at Bishop Anstey/Trinity College East. He is also an accomplished youth guitarist with an interest in jazz and blues. He also dabbles with the piano, violin, ukulele and drums. He has performed on stage on the electric guitar with the youth jazz band, Tranz, and on the violin with the St Augustine Chamber Orchestra (SACO). He learned drums while at school for a short while in Jamaica. Gibbings beat a regional field of contestants to cop the Innovation Prize with a video production entitled Finding Love, which focuses on the scourge of violence against women in the Caribbean. The overall prize was won by Lena Taupier of Saint Lucia. "Before hearing about this competition I had never thought about, much less tried to make any type of film," he said. "After coming up with a few ideas, I talked to my good friend Sy-Han Wu who is a brilliant visual artist who is featured throughout the video drawing various things including the chalk butterfly and rose, as well as the writing in the first scene with the hands. "The hands were those of another of my good friends, Kristian Ali, who also helped me and Sy-Han in a scene that involved drawing, over 100 times, an incredibly detailed crying eye which was eventually cut from the final video," Gibbings said in comments published on the Youth-IN Facebook page.
The music for the video was composed and performed on the guitar by the young musician/film-maker. "The music was one of my favourite parts of this project to make since my passion is music," Gibbings said. "It is 99 per cent improvised so it took exactly the amount of time to write as it took to record which saved a considerable amount of time and was very fun to do." The low-budget production also took some imagination. "Our equipment was incredibly improvised also," Gibbings said. "Especially since we had a budget only large enough to purchase a roll of electric tape and a bottle of hand sanitiser. "Our (my father's) tripod was broken so the camera had to be taped to it. Lighting when it got darker during the first scene was achieved using a cellphone. The last scene was shot on an iPod which was duct-taped to a tripod and the images on the ground were drawn with old chalk from everyone's houses." Gibbings recieved his prize at a special ceremony in Barbados yesterday.
