Salt 5-Day Summer Multimedia Workshop!

**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!

Salt Website Competes for Top Honors!

PORTLAND – The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies is competing with four other schools for the honor of operating
the best school and university website in the nation.

Officials at the school on Congress Street learned on Tuesday that Salt Institute is one of five finalists nominated for a Webby Award, as
well as a Webby People’s Voice Award.

The nominations and the possibility of grabbing an honor from a much larger school represent an
opportunity to raise the school’s, as well as Portland’s, national exposure.

The city and several of its businesses, including Otto’s Pizza, Coffee by Design and Hot Suppa, are featured prominently
on Salt’s website, which was redesigned by Pulp + Wire, a Portland-based Web and brand design and marketing firm.

The website says that being in Portland is one of the perks of studying at Salt.

“It’s a really big deal,” said Salt’s executive director, Donna Galluzzo. “It’s like the Oscars of the Web design world.”

This year, the 17th annual Webby Awards, which have been described by The New York Times as the Internet’s highest recognition, received more than
11,000 entries from over 65 countries.

From the thousands of entries, only 7 percent, or five nominees in each category, make it to the final round.

Online voting, which began Tuesday, will remain open until midnight on April 25, according to a press release posted on the Webby Awards website (www.webbyawards.com).

“We would be so psyched to get Portlanders and Mainers to vote for us,” Galluzzo said.

The 2013 awards cover a diverse spectrum of websites, videos, brands and stars.

Salt,which has 25 to 30 students enrolled during any given semester, is going up against significantly larger schools, including the University
of Maryland and the University of Chicago, in the best school and university website category.

The other finalists in the category are Goucher College in Baltimore and New School, a university based in New York City.

Taja Dockendorf, the owner and creative director of Pulp + Wire, said the school’s new website tries to tell a story, not just about the school
and its programs but about Portland.

“We tried to encompass all of the elements, including writing and photography, that Salt is known for,” Dockendorf said.

The Webby Award and Webby People’s Voice Award winners will be announced April 30.

All of the winners will be honored at the annual Webby Awards ceremony on May 21 in New York City.

The awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Salt Institute is a nonprofit school offering semester-long intensive programs in documentary writing, radio, photography and multimedia, with
an emphasis on powerful storytelling.

Salt was founded in Kennebunk in 1973 by Pamela Wood, a high school English teacher.

Since it was founded, more than 800 U.S. and international students have attended Salt.

To visit the school’s website, go to salt.edu.

Staff Writer Dennis Hoey can be contacted at 791-6365 or at:

dhoey@pressherald.com

Week 7: Multimedia

Early last week, Portland was on the cusp of spring—birds were chirping, the sky was blue, people even ventured outside without hats. I hear it was great. I enjoyed the nice weather from the safety of my apartment, busily reworking the final draft of my first writing piece. This left little time for multimedia, but my brain found a unique solution: multimedia dreams (which were really more like nightmares). While my  body tried to rest, my mind worked itself into paralysis over the shortcomings of my final multimedia project.

At this point in the program, our final projects are locked in and we’ll all gathering photos, videos, and interviews and developing the arc of our stories. I was a little stuck. The root of the problem was the phone. I needed to schedule a time to go into the field with my subject, but I hate making phone calls, so I put it off. This meant that I finished the weekend neither well rested nor properly prepared. Luckily, spring in Maine is fickle. On Monday night it started snowing. The prediction was for over twelve inches of snow, so Tuesday’s multimedia class was rescheduled. I used this reprieve to make phone calls. Lots of phone calls. It was a stressful hour, but successful: by Wednesday morning I had concrete plans to meet my subject on Friday.
“You’re pretty brave,” my subject commented. This was Friday night. The two of us were hiking up a wooded slope, alone, at night. To her, this was an act of bravery (possibly stupidity). I like being outside, especially at night, so for me, this was the easiest part of the week. But it doesn’t mean she was wrong. I was pretty brave this week, I used the phone to call strangers. And for the first time in a month, I felt great.

- Alison, writing

Week 7: Radio

For the past month, I’ve been time traveling. I’ve been venturing out of state to a living history museum that replicates village life in 19^th century rural New England and getting to know the historical interpreters: those costumed men and women who operate the village for a curious 21^st century public. Donning period clothes, they are trained in period skills, everything from doling out caramels at the general store to printing on an ink press. They do so with a wink and a lesson. Did you know that a skilled compositor, who arranged moveable type, could set 1000 characters an hour? Now you do. Historical interpreters have long fascinated me, the way some other little girls were captivated by Disney Princesses. 100-proof unadulterated magic. On every family vacation and field trip (it’s a rite of passage for most kids in the Massachusetts/Connecticut area), I would try to get one of them alone and ask the questions about who they were “in real life.”

 
I was never successful until Salt, with an ID card marked “documentary student” and a microphone to cut through the illusion. It’s been wonderful. I can follow my curiosity and ask all the questions I’ve always wanted to. In return, four interpreters—two men and two women with nearly 90 years of experience among them—have shared generously about their professional and personal lives. Their tape is rife with interesting material. The more I listen, the more amazed I am by the alignment of their working lives with their personal values: face-to-face conversation, simplicity, experiential learning, accessibility of history, awareness of food pathways, energy use, and labor. They’ve shared what it means to interpret history and have entrusted me with an interpretation of that intimate knowledge. In many ways, I feel like a historical interpreter to a second degree. I am plagued by a low-lying terror of producing a radio feature that won’t do their work justice.

 
The past three weeks have been a challenge for precisely that reason. At first, I took a multi-pronged approach to the story out of fear that eliminating angles would dilute the material. My first script read like an extended village scene, a knotted mess of quirky details (e.g. they made condoms from sheep intestines!) without a clear narrative. I began looking elsewhere, inspecting the tape with a spyglass for moments of tension. I wanted Mystery! Intrigue! I wanted to raise the stakes so listeners would take the work of historical interpreters seriously. My second script looked at the business side of living history and how museums had to make history digestible for the sensitive public. It thickened the plot, but with a weak agent. I hadn’t done enough reporting to make a conclusive statement about the managerial evolution of the museum. Back to the drawing board.

 
No small amount of hair has been spared extraction from my scalp as I’ve tried to salvage my script. I don’t know why it’s been so difficult, but it is. It is extremely difficult to distill real life in all its blithe wildness into a radio story.

 
Mary, another radio student who is skilled at getting to the heart of matters, took me aside the other day and said: “Why did this story interest you in the first place?” I thought about it.

 
The answer to that question is very simple: the people. I love these people.

 
“There’s your story,” she said.

 
And that is what my radio feature is amounting to. It’s tempting at Salt, where you have so much time, technology, and access to interesting people, to dream up a five-part saga fit for the History Channel. That’s a false idol, I’m coming to realize, for anyone but Ken Burns. Plus you don’t have Morgan Freeman’s voice. You have yours, your time, and your ability to work hard. My piece will probably be six minutes long. It will not make any grand statements or groundbreaking discoveries. Its scope has narrowed and its goals winnowed from a competing jury of many to the one most important: to bring historical interpreters into the purview of the listener and have the listener understand, for six minutes, why someone would want to spend 40 hours a week in another time period. Six minutes of suspended reality, six minutes I need to make worth your time.

 
Ironically, the person who understood this far better than I did was my main subject. She’s a radio junkie. It’s allowed a nice rapport to develop between us, a give and take that makes our interviewer-interviewee relationship mutually beneficial. She’s fascinated by radio production. I’m fascinated by historical interpretation. We try to make our jobs as transparent to one another as possible.

 
Our first conversation took place as she was seated behind the counter of a country store skimming a newspaper for sewing machine advertisements. Radio is the first thing we talked about. She understood that I needed to record ambient sounds of her sheep baaing for authenticity, remarking that she would notice if I had recorded sheep at another museum. She said something else too, something that I knew would never make it into the radio feature, would never be heard by anyone but me, but that articulated the challenge of her job, my job, and the job of anyone whose job is to interpret the lives of others: “I love the people who just tell the most boring, mundane, cereal eating parts of their lives, but they’re beautiful because of how they tell the story. It’s not taking the most extraordinary events, but taking everyday events and allowing them to be extraordinary.”

Week 7: Writing

“To be a writer is to betray the facts. It’s one of the more ruthless things about being a writer, finally, in that to cast an experience into words is in some way to lose the reality of the experience itself, to sacrifice the fact of it to whatever imaginative pattern one’s wound requires.”
– Christian Wiman

I am an over-sharer by birth. In my family, feelings are like food: to be set down on the dinner table and shared, chewed over and digested. I make friends on airplanes to San Francisco, or elevators to the tenth floor – any enclosed space where it is perfectly okay to ignore the people around you, avoiding their eyes by staring down at your shoes. I don’t know how to have acquaintances, or peripheral friends — my friendships are founded on the kind of tell-all, late night conversations that necessitate a life-long bond; as a child, over tubs of ice cream in my parent’s kitchen, and now, on a bench in the park, or in the corner of a bar. A moment of connection, a lesson that we are only as misunderstood as we let ourselves be.

Our culture thrives on over-sharing. Thanks to Facebook, I know what my lab partner from my sophomore year of high school ate for dinner, and how it sat in his stomach. We’ve grown out of modesty. Left privacy at the door. A few weeks ago at Salt, we had a Skype session with a social media guru who urged us to build our social media presence, establish our beat, and curate tweets to fit within the Twitterverse.

I might seem like the prime user for social media, but in fact, I hate it. Sharing my thoughts comes naturally with my closest friends, but not with an unlimited amount of strangers on the internet. The same goes for the personal essay, which happens to be our next assignment in writing class. The idea of showing my essay to my fellow writing students doesn’t make me lose much sleep, but the prospect of making it accessible to all of the internet unnerves me.

In “The Limit”, Christian Wiman writes about the dark underbelly of his family; his words are so hauntingly raw that it is easy to forget the risk he is taking in exposing his personal history. Writing for “the reader” is a daunting task. Who is this reader? How will they judge me? And addressing my own personal history, it would be impossible to not include others. Rarely are people flattered by their portrayal on the page or their face on the screen. Somehow, I run the risk of not doing my loved ones justice, betraying their essence, filtering the facts through my own experience. By striving for honesty, will I inevitably falsify my experience?

Salt Fundraising night at Otto Pizza March 19!

Please join us on the evening of Tuesday, March 19 for a Salt fundraiser across the street in the dining room at Otto Pizza (574 Congress St) – order pizza/salad/drinks (dine-in or takeout) between 5 and 9pm and a portion of the evening’s proceeds will go to Salt! Stay tuned for more details on Facebook.

Tickets + schedule for this year’s Maine Jewish Film Festival

News from our friends at the Maine Jewish Film Festival - get your tickets for this year’s screenings (including a free one here at Salt on March 11) now!

The new website is launched and tickets are on sale now. To see the full line up, go to mjff.org. We’ve got films that will make you laugh, cry and cheer. We’ve got filmmakers visiting and available for post film q&a – and a movie trailer of our own to share. We’re ready for MJFF 2013, and hope you are too!

Upcoming Events
Wednesday, February 20 at 8:00pm at One Longfellow Square
The Maine Jewish Film Festival and One Longfellow Present Naftule’s Dream
Join us in welcoming Boston’s Naftule’s Dream to Portland for the first time.

Originally a side project of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra- Glenn Dickson, Clarinet; Michael McLaughlin, accordion; Eric Rosenthal, drums; James Gray, tuba; and Andrew Stern, guitar- the band has prospered into its own band of Jewish ties. Incorporating Klezmer as well as new age rock and jazz into their music makes Naftule’s Dream unique, creating a significant name for themselves and the sound of new Jewish music.

Tickets are $10 and are available online at onelongfellowsquare.com, through the Box Office located at 181 State Street in Portland or by calling (207) 761-1757.

Sunday, March 3 at 3:30pm at The Strand Theatre
“A Bottle in the Gaza Sea” (previously scheduled for Feb. 10, cancelled due to snow storm)

“A Bottle in the Gaza Sea,” directed by Thierry Binitsi, deals with 17 year-old Tal who has emigrated from France to Jerusalem with her family. Following a bombing, Tal writes a letter refusing to accept that only hatred can reign between the Israelis and the Palestinians. She slips the letter into a bottle and her brother throws it into the sea. Her letter brings a response from Naïm, a young Palestinian. A turbulent but tender long-distance friendship develops as they both seek to understand and change the history that divides them.

Tickets for admission are $8.50 and may be purchased at the time of the showing. For more information visit www.rocklandstrand.com or call (207) 594-0070. The film will also be screened as part of MJFF’s full line up in Portland.

In the Shadows: A Kickstarter Launch Party

On Thursday, February 7th at 6pm, two Salt Institute alums will host an event to benefit their alma mater and to raise awareness of a growing crisis for refugee children in Africa.
Salt Alum and National Geographic Photographer Amy Toensing is launching a Kickstarter campaign to document the lives of forgotten refugee children. RefugePoint, an international humanitarian organization that finds lasting solutions for the world’s most vulnerable refugees will provide in-country assistance and expertise to make this happen.

Friend and fellow alum Cheryl Hamilton works for RefugePoint as a communication officer and portrays the crisis this way.

“Refugee camps across Africa are increasingly overcrowded and unsafe. This past year, multiple bombs exploded and several aid organizations were forced to scale down their operations. As a result, more and more refugees are fleeing to urban areas like Cairo and Nairobi in search of protection, and the most vulnerable are children.”
Today, more than 50% of Africa’s refugee population can be found in urban areas where humanitarian aid is limited and the danger to a child’s life is even greater. RefugePoint regularly assists girls and boys who have been victims of sexual and gender-based violence, xenophobic attacks and human trafficking.

“The risks and choices these children face are almost indescribable,” Hamilton notes.
With the funds raised through her Kickstarter campaign In the Shadows, Toensing will go to Africa to document this mounting humanitarian crisis and produce print and online exhibits that give a voice to these shadowed individuals. These exhibits will open on June 20 this year in honor of World Refugee Day and travel to multiple cities in print and around the world virtually.
Part of the pair’s motivation for hosting the launch at Salt is their desire to also give back to the institution. As Toensing explains, “Both Cheryl and I consider Salt as instrumental in our careers. Salt opened doors for us and instilled a strong appreciation for the power of storytelling whether through photography or writing. Now, our hope is to harness that power to protect refugee children.”
The Kickstarter launch party is scheduled for Thursday, February 7th from 6pm-7:30pm. Toensing will speak about her work as a photographer and Hamilton, joined by refugees from Maine, will discuss the current crisis for children in Africa. The event is free however donations will be accepted. Among other activities, Toensing will be auctioning off some of her prints.  Proceeds raised with support the campaign and Salt. Please RSVP to  HYPERLINK “https://www.facebook.com/events/464225930311015/” https://www.facebook.com/events/464225930311015/ or  HYPERLINK “http://intheshadowslaunch.eventbrite.com/#” http://intheshadowslaunch.eventbrite.com/#