Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Jon Anderegg of Sweet Home recently completed his internship in video production, but he did something different than the average aspiring moviemaker.
He went to Africa to get his feet wet in the business.
When Anderegg, 23, graduated last May from Bob Jones University in South Carolina, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do when the opportunity came up to go to the Dark Continent.
“The film industry is unpredictable, even more than here,” he said. “It’s feast or famine.”
Anderegg grew up with an older brother and sister who were traveling the world. His brother entered the military and attended West Point. His sister traveled Europe while in college. Anderegg wanted to do the same kind of thing.
“I was thinking about doing a missions trip,” he said, but a student newspaper question provided him an unexpected opportunity.
The newspaper, on which he worked during some of his college, asked students in a feature called “Talk Back,” where they would go if they could go anywhere.
Anderegg answered “Kenya.”
A Bob Jones alumnus, Bob Nyanja, who runs a film company in Kenya called Cinematic Solutions, saw the feature and contacted the BJU film school. One thing led to another and, after a battery of shots and paperwork, Anderegg found himself on a plane headed for Kenya.
“I went over as an intern for a six-month stay,” he said.
He went to work in June for the company, which has done work on Hollywood feature films, such as “Tomb Raider” and “The Constant Gardener,” and TV shows like “Survivor: Africa.” The company also produces TV shows and commercials for the African market.
“While I was there, I wrote my first full-length script,” he said. The story centers around some of the struggles in the life of his father, who is pastor of Elm Street Baptist Church in Sweet Home. Anderegg hopes to use it as a writing sample to get into graduate school in screenwriting and film studies.
Being in Africa was a whole new ball game for Anderegg, who lived in Sweet Home from 1992 until he left for college.
“I really didn’t know what to expect,” he said. It turned out to be a completely different culture.
“Different things are important to them. They’re very relational, focused on relationships and family.”
Kenya is ranked third in the world for the disparity between the rich and poor, Anderegg said. Some 60 percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day.
It also has extreme wealth, Anderegg said, with “a lot of very wealthy people living next door” to the poor.
He enjoyed seeing “the amount of diversity in their culture,” Anderegg said. Christians and Muslims live together, with no evidence of animosity. His visit there was the first time he had met a Muslim.
Islam and the Arab world, along with India, have a huge influence on the nation.
“Basically, we worked mostly on television material,” Anderegg said. He worked on a documentary with the University of Nairobi about using “The Merchant of Venice” as a teaching tool.
He also worked on commercials for Coca-Cola and the Kenya’s Electoral Committee.
He said the recent post-election violence in Kenya struck home when he realized he came close to working for Raila Odinga, the opposition candidate whose loss in the recent presidential elections in Kenya has triggered weeks of rioting and fighting in the country, leaving hundreds dead.
Anderegg said he was nearly hired to handle video for a birthday party involving Odinga.
“The thing of it is, when I read about it, the slum that has the biggest violence – I walked by it every day while I was there,” he said. “The guy who lost, that was his constituency, whom he represents.”
On most projects, Anderegg was the assistant director, which means he managed the set and served as the eyes and ears of the director. His job was to make sure everything stayed on schedule and that everything needed to complete the job was available.
On a talk show, encouraging youth to get involved in politics, he served as technical director. In the talk show format, he was responsible for switching cameras instead of cutting the show later.
Anderegg also enjoyed a little time exploring, he said.
“I made a weekend trip to Kapala, Uganda.”
People in Kenya are “very disorganized,” he said. Everyone might agree on a weekend trip to the Indian Ocean, and then they will cancel the day before the planned trip because they have other things to do.
That happened one weekend, he said. No one wanted to go into Uganda to the beach. So Anderegg decided he might as well go by himself.
He took his $100 paycheck for that week and bought a bus ticket – no maps, no planning and one phone number for someone he knew in Uganda.
He ended up spending the last of his money at the border to get into Uganda, he said. He had been told it would be $15 for the visa, but it turned out to be $50.
“I rode a 15-hour bus ride over some of the worst roads you’ve ever seen,” he said.
With no money left, not even for a phone call, he was essentially stranded in a foreign country.
The bus dropped him off a ways from the downtown area, he said, and he had no idea where he was.
He asked around and then started walking, he said, looking for an ATM that would work with an American credit card.
He ended up meeting a young woman who bought him a bus ticket into downtown Kapala, he said. She spotted him and just started talking to him.
“That’s Africa,” he said.
He eventually found an ATM and ended up staying the night at Lake Victoria in a room that cost $8 per night. The room was in a low building with an opening covered by a bead curtain. It smelled like a chicken coop. He spent the night with his sleep interrupted by a bunch of mice that also occupied the room before getting on a bus the next day for the trip home.
Anderegg also got a chance to go on a short mission trip while there. Anderegg’s boss’s wife, Patricia Nyanja, was a German missionary to Kenya. They carried supplies to the northern part of Kenya to Marsabit, just south of Ethiopia, to a new school funded by a Dutch non-governmental organization.
He said he discovered that the Kenyan landscape is diverse, ranging from wide-open savannahs and snow-capped mountains to barren deserts, jungles and pineapple plantations.
He didn’t see as many exotic animals as he had hoped he might, he said. He saw plenty of monkeys, camels, giraffes and water buffalo, but not so many lions or hippos.
Anderegg returned to Oregon on Dec. 3.
The time change was interesting, he said. There’s 11 hours difference between Kenya and Oregon, and it’s summer there right now with hot temperatures that didn’t drop below 80 degrees even at 2 a.m.
“The biggest lesson I learned was probably just being professional in what you do,” he said. Kenya is a third-world country where “you don’t think of it as a place to go to find success in film.”
But he learned everything he needed there to fit into production and work with the other people involved.
Being in another culture helped show him how important professionalism is “no matter where you are,” he said. The crews there made professionalism a priority.
The people also have a different perspective on the United States, he said. Some dislike U.S. policy, while others are supportive, but all of it is from a viewpoint quite different from an American.
“Their reasoning for things is completely different,” he said. “And it’s good to be exposed to that. You might not agree with it, but you can understand it.”
Anderegg is applying now for graduate school at Hollins University in Roanoke, Va. He plans to move there in February or March. After finishing a summer program, he’ll go back and look for a job in film, possibly in television.
Ultimately, “I would love to work in feature films, write scripts and direct,” he said, although he primarily would prefer to work on Christian films.