This piece about the Venezuelan gold trade was commissioned by BBC Digital at the height of the 2019 leadership crisis in the South American country. The President, Nicolás Maduro was facing a challenge to his rule by the opposition leader Juan Guaido.
Due to the political unrest and international sanctions on the country’s trade in oil Venezuela has had to rely on other sources of income including the trade in Gold. In the midst of all this crisis the president was being accused of illegally selling gold around the world.
At the time Mark Lowen was the Turkey correspondent. He and I created this explainer, reporting from Istanbul.
Digital explainers when commissioned like this are designed to stay on the BBC website for some time and links to them can be added to any web page related to that story. Quite often they are correspondent led and contain a lot of explanation that is done to camera and not much in the way of recorded voice over (VO).
Mark and I went to a popular gold trading area in Istanbul to film the on-location Pieces to Camera (PTC) and all of the street shots. The explainer shots were all done in the bureau edit suite.
Cameras. Used:
C300 mkii, Canon 5D mkiv, and a GoPro Hero 7.