It’s go time. As in, go-do-work-all-the-time, time. Final projects are due in five days, which means the world now revolves around my computer screen and the seven minutes of my piece. Seven minutes distilled from two months of interviewing and photographing and collecting natural sound. Brutal. There are so many moments that didn’t make the cut, that will never be heard by anyone but me. The hardest part of trimming and shaving and editing the piece is thinking I know the story well enough that these decisions are correct.

But I have to know the story well enough—it’s my story. That was the biggest lesson from this week. All of our stories have now been through several rounds of critiques, which means we’ve gotten a lot of helpful advice. My problem was thinking that the advice was creating my piece, that I could half-heartedly throw something together and then work from the feedback. This was not a good approach. Whether I realized it, or not, I am the authority on my story and I needed to commit. So I started over again. I went through every clip and put aside anything that might be useful. I made lists of information that needed to be included and things that did not. I got so sucked into the work that I forgot to move my car, which was parked in a two-hour zone. But I finished the story. And I’m happy with it.  And in five days, it will be done.

The post Week 13: Multimedia appeared first on Salt Institute.

“How do you feel?” Nelson, my photography teacher, asked.

I felt proud — to have completed a long-term, intensive documentary project, my first. But I also felt something contrary to how I thought I was supposed to feel at this point in the semester: “I don’t know that I’ve completed the project,” I told him.

I wasn’t sure I’d accomplished what I set out to do, and was worried that ultimately my work fell under what Nelson had cautioned it might become: traditional photos of a non-traditional family. I didn’t feel that I had been able to veer away from that path.

It was a sense of accomplishment, hand-in-hand with a sense of wanting more.

To Nelson, that sense of incompletion wasn’t a bad thing. “The idea is not that you’ve created a finished piece,” he said. “It’s that you use that feeling to compel you to improve your work as you continue with it,” he said. He told me he hoped I’d continue working on my project, and expand on it after Salt.

Finishing projects and exchanging goodbyes with one’s subjects is a complicated thing. I’ve been incredibly lucky to find a subject family that was cooperative and invested in the work, but even more, one that I truly do care about. After two months documenting a person, there’s a real sense of intimacy.

I wonder sometimes how I’ve affected them, because my time with this family has truly affected me. My feelings about my subject family, too, play heavily into how I feel about my pieces. Sometimes I wonder, and other times I fear: What will they think of me once they’ve seen the final product? Will they like seeing how I see them?

But these are fears fueled more by nerves than reality: I think they’ll enjoy my work. Because there’s a larger question that I feel I can answer in good faith: Have I captured them truthfully?

The post Week 13: Photo appeared first on Salt Institute.

The post Week 12: Writing appeared first on Salt Institute.

The post Week 12: Multimedia appeared first on Salt Institute.

The post Week 12: Photo appeared first on Salt Institute.

The post Week 12: Radio appeared first on Salt Institute.

**The July 8 – 12 session is now full.**

A second session will be offered July 15-19.

Find out more and register HERE.

This July, Salt will offer its first-ever short multimedia workshop – this five-day intensive multimedia storytelling program aims to equip you with the skills necessary to shoot and produce powerful, short-form documentaries through compelling video, photography and audio. You will engage in hands-on training in still photography, DSLR video, audio and editing with Lightroom and Final Cut X. Coursework will be geared toward the beginner to intermediate student and will focus primarily on DSLR video shooting and production, including interviewing, external sound recording, b-roll, basic lighting and editing.

Expect to dive headfirst into multimedia, shooting stories in and around Portland, critiquing your colleagues’ work and exploring trends in the DSLR video world. Whether your goal is to film weddings or to shoot and produce short documentaries, Salt’s summer intensive multimedia storytelling program will give you the skills you need to succeed.

If you have your own DSLR camera with video capabilities, great! If not, we’ll check one out to you to use for the duration of the program (each camera may be shared by up to 2 students). You’ll have your own iMac computer to work on while you’re here.

REGISTER EARLY AND SAVE! 

REGISTER AND PAY IN FULL:

before May 1: $850 tuition

after May 1: $1000 tuition

Housing + some meals available! 

Salt can provide housing for up to 10 students approximately two blocks from Salt. The three-apartment building is fully decorated with furnishings, kitchen tools, dishes and basic linens in addition to wireless internet and common room TVs with basic cable. Apartments include individual bedrooms with full-size beds, common room and shared kitchen and bathroom. Housing is available at a rate of $500 for 7 days (July 14 – 20) and will be allotted on a first come, first served basis.  Salt will provide a simple lunch and some Continental breakfast foods over the course of the five-day program. Students are responsible for their own dinners and for any special dietary needs.

Interested? email admissions@salt.edu for more information! Or REGISTER here!

The post Salt 5-Day Summer Multimedia Workshop! appeared first on Salt Institute.

This past weekend I drove three hours north to shoot for our video profile assignment. Basically, we were supposed to find someone with a good story to tell – and then tell it. Sounds simple, right? Oh, dear goodness, no. No, it wasn’t.

On the drive north, all I could think about was that I had clearly forgotten something. Obviously I was going to pull up to this person’s driveway and realize that I had forgotten batteries, or the lav mic, or the lav mic’s extra batteries. As it turns out I had everything and as this person was inviting me into their home, I realize I would just have to own this. I had no idea what I was doing. My fingers fumbled over all the equipment looking for the right buttons and knobs, but I just pretended that this was the way it goes. If this shoot was going to get done, I would have to take charge and get it done. I was literally saying these things to myself in my head, a mental pep talk. This is what it takes to get good video when you’re not confident in your skills – just fake it. Make a check list of things to do while you’re shooting and check it often – blatantly! In front of your subject. Because even if you only remembered to focus your shot because you checked your to-do list, they are going to think you’re professional. Or at least they are much more likely to if you don’t have to call them to do the interview all over again because you screwed up because of your own ego. (Realize that “you” is, indeed, “me”).

Oh, and that storm of which I was speaking. The deadlines. And the fact that technology is a cold master that doesn’t love you and never will. If you accept this now, in the eleventh week, you might make it out without a broken heart (broken heart = sleep deprivation and deep inner turmoil due to repetitive mouse clicking).

The post Week 11: Multimedia appeared first on Salt Institute.

The post Week 11: Radio appeared first on Salt Institute.

Many of them confessed to having locked down their second stories late in the game, and only weeks before the end of the semester. We knew deep inside that we would never be like them. We wouldn’t make their same mistakes.

Here we are now, three out of five of us, still trying to find our second stories.

One thing I’ve learned from my time here so far is that the work you do at Salt is all-absorbing. When you’ve chosen wisely, you become so invested in your documentary project that it’s hard to tear yourself away, or to allow room – or thought — for a second. In order to photograph and truly document, you become enmeshed in the everyday of your subjects’ lives.

Nelson knows this. And he’s seen our efforts to find second stories fall flat, or fall through. Ever the open and flexible instructor, he offered up his own solution: You can all work on your second project, together.

But get on it.

His proposal approached the project through a collaborative lens: Working together would allow us to explore a concept as a group, and to work off each others’ ideas, perspectives, and varying strengths while out in the field. For us, mostly, it would be rejuvenating to work in a different context.

So we’re in the process of looking into stories. And it’s clear, just in the process of talking through our ideas, that we’ve already begun to think about photography differently than when we first began our semester. The questions we pose are more thoughtful, and so are the parameters of our project: How can we tell a story that will actually benefit from multiple photographers? What stories have three different perspectives that can be told?

We’ve spent a lot of time asking these questions, because while we do want to choose a story — and soon — we want to choose one where we can grow technically and conceptually as photographers. The big question we’re looking to answer, specifically: What’s going to make this a project where we raise questions, rather than answer them?

The post Week 11: Photo appeared first on Salt Institute.