Jen and Kyle are two South African's travelling around Europe, and eventually settling in Edinburgh, Scotland. Ducklight Travels is a concept that they came up with before they left. They were sitting in their favourite restaurant in Mellville, Johannesburg, named Mezzaluna. Kyle told Jen of his idea to make a video diary as they trip across Europe that year. Her response wasn't entirely positive, though they both agreed that it would be a truly wicked concept. He said, "Lets both choose a word, and then, both at the same time, shout out the word that we had chosen. From this exciting and fun task, we will come up with a highly original and equally-contributed-towards-name for our documentary".

Kyle shouted "Duck" and Jen shouted "Light".

When they arrived in London, they bought a Dell notebook, a Canon MV890 video camera, and two mini-DV tapes, and started filming episode number one, on the 27th January, 2007. Episodes are worked on over a good couple of weeks because of the amount of editing that is required, as well as deserved. It started in London, and has since moved up with them to Edinburgh, Scotland. The adventures continue, and they're only going to get better.

Ducklight Travels Technical Babblings

Just for the geekish people out there, some random information about the whole Ducklight Travels project. Although it's still tiny in comparison to most video projects out there, it's still quite bold in it's size.

Ducklight Travels...

* is currently totalling over 65 gigabytes worth of uncompressed video footage.
* has over 5 hours of uncut footage so far, consisting of around 750 organized clips.
* videos are captured at a rate of 3.85Mb per second, at standard widescreen PAL.
* is all stored on one main server because the files got too large to all keep on the notebook we bought!
* is edited and composited in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0.
* episodes take around a month to edit and complete before releasing to you, the public.
* although edited through commercial software, is compressed and encoded using an open source program called VirtualDub.
* had a viewership of close to 200 people (and counting) for the first episode.

... and more to come as the project grows and grows!