I just finished a week-long workshop “Documentary Shorts for the Web” at the fabled Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine. The workshop was conducted by John Poole, video producer for NPR and the Washington Post (among others). Only six of the eight participants attended, which was just dandy for the rest of us as the room was pretty crowded as it was.
One week of immersion in the basics of subject selection, planning, filming, reviewing footage, story planning, editing, a little more shooting, editing, more editing, and finally exporting and compression was just what I was looking for. Like all good workshops, the experience puts you in a completely different workflow and demands something in a short amount of time (on Tuesday you think it’ll be a breeze, and by the 3pm Friday deadline you are scrambling to finish something beyond a rough cut).
I had great instructors and classmates with a wide set of talents and backgrounds, so I learned a lot from everybody. Most of the workshops submit their work for a Friday evening screening on the big screen in the Soundstage. Considering we were making shorts destined for a 640×360 pixel window on a browser, they held up pretty darn well on the 50 foot screen.
I want to make a couple tiny tweaks to my edit before letting it loose on the world so I’ll put it in a separate posting. Special thanks to my shooting partner Barbara - we did all of the location work together and then made separate edits of the same footage. It was really neat seeing two separate, yet equally compelling, stories emerge from the same images and words we recorded.
There wasn’t much time for photography, but I took a few “tourist shots” of the workshop and the beautiful surroundings of the Maine coast. Click here for the full gallery (with captions!)
