susan's final critique

SUSAN MUMBUA 08-1277. FINAL CRITIQUE ON TAHIDI HIGH.
An action packed high school drama, full of intrigue, love, infighting as well as the usual battle of the sexes. Based on a high-class secondary school, Tahidi High brings to fore the daily conflicts between teachers, students and parents in a typical Kenyan setting. It’s a story about students' struggle to tackle life's dilemmas and challenges and teachers struggling to bring sanity to the institution and those within it.

I had the chance to watch TV with a reason and look at the various local programmes on TV and think about our Kenyan production. It was really hard sometimes to know what the programme really wanted to bring out but Tahidi was focused on high school students and they portrayed different themes, I got to learn some of them like boy/girl relationships and its effects in students, evils in the society like stealing, lying and how their consequences were bad.
For example on 16th March this was the theme: sexual relationship among students.

“Freddy receives the letter and he thinks he might be in some kind of trouble.
During class break we see Freddy reading the letter and after a short while he faints and Louis and Tanya help him, instead if helping him they start reading the letter creating more suspense because they don’t say what’s in the letter, when he wakes up he goes straight to Omosh to borrow his phone because he needs to talk to his cousin and this is where we get the story behind the letter. He had sexual relations with Schola in their Rural home and she is pregnant. So he is asking the cousin how come the contraceptives he gave him didn’t work and the cousin goes off because of credit. On the other side Louis is telling his friends about the letter and they are curious to find it but Tanya doesn’t give them, Freddy is at risk because he might have contracted STI’s or HIV/AIDS so he goes to the guidance and counseling teacher on hoe to go about the test. Just after talking to the teacher Omosh comes running giving Freddy the phone and it’s Freddy’s cousin telling him that the girl was playing a joke on them. She wasn’t pregnant. Freddy is relieved but there’s another problem Miss Morgan saw him talking on phone so he is in trouble and it ends in suspense…………’ and handling this kind of theme taught a lesson to the audience, especially students. Another theme they handled is the theme of cheating for example in exams,

‘O.J got his exam results and he is not happy with his exam results since he got 37% and therefore he had to see the teacher to explain the cause for his low marks. Since it was parents’ day he uncle Omosh had to see the teacher instead. In the process he changed his results to read 87% so when his uncle went to see the teacher he knew he was in trouble. The rest of the students seem to be all over the place because their parents are coming to school to see their results, for some they are happy but for others they are not happy because they didn’t do well in the exams. Omosh is not happy with O.J’s results so he decides to talk to O.J about his academics so that he can improve because this is his last year in high school. From these there’s the theme of education and its importance, because it worries Omosh that O.J isn’t performing well………….’

Apart from that they need to step up especially their acting skills and production skills. Before we go to the production skills, I would like to point out that there are reflective habits in the programme with students these are things that happen in schools day in day out. Students carry phones to school yet its not allowed. They cheat on exams, trash each others names and so it’s a good thing that they are portraying these even to the parents to enlighten them on what really happens in schools. Now production was getting better everyday, there were camera shots, camera movements, lighting, use of microphone and sound. For example camera shots and movements:
Camera shots- close-up- especially when showing someone’s emotions
Long-shots- when Julia was walking toward the mother.
Full shots- when showing Julia’s mother form of dressing

Close-up to see the business paper when it was left on the table and zooming in to see the letters on the paper. When Joni is in dilemma on whether to pick the paper or not there’s extreme close-up that makes the viewer feel like he is in the dilemma too, it leaves you thinking what if I was in his shoes what would I do? There’s a three shot when Lisa and her two friends are reading in the library before Joni joins them. Long- shot and some sounds to create the mood as Mr. Karimi approaches the class and it made me start talking to the TV telling the students to disperse like nothing is going on. Dolly in and dolly-out to show how the different students were revising and you almost feel the tension in the room. It looks so real.
When it came to sound it had some faults like when the person holding the mic moved you could hear some background movements, and it distorted the sound, they mostly used omni directional mic because it picked sounds from the surrounding. Lighting there were several shadows formed that means they didn’t use enough lighting to dissolve the shadows. They mostly used incident lighting because they used the light from the sun and they shot during the day. Even with that some rooms were dark the light wasn’t even and they didn’t show the people inside the room clearly. That’s all I observed during this time that I watched Tahidi high and it was a good challenge.