What can we tell you about today…we began the day on schedule, with the car picking us up at 8:30am to head back over to the school. Today was presentation day, which means that Fred, Wendy, Tony, and Mike were destined to spend all day staring at their computers sorting through the nearly 30,000 images the students shot this week. Our task was to pull together 6 slideshows: four shows (one per group) that would showcase the 12 best images each student made this week, one gag reel that would give the audience a behind-the-scenes look at the workshop week, and one show that would present the stories we’ve worked on all week. All told, we’d be making about 30+ minutes of video slideshows today. Not a very exciting day, but we began at about 9:00am and the last of the crew still working headed to bed the next morning at around 1:00am…however, this beat the previous workshops’ finish time by more than 2 hours (in Nicaragua we hit the sack around 3:00am, if I remember correctly…).
The group best of slideshows were pretty straightforward. We took the best images each of the five students made and put them all together. Then we sequenced them so that the final slideshow would flow smoothly, adding music and finishing them off with a credits roll at the end. The gag reel was even simpler: we took the funniest shots of the week with all our goofy antics, mixed in some touching moments and added some high-energy music…the recipe for quite a few laughs and maybe a few sniffles.
The story show was Wendy’s job, and it was a real beast. After Fred, Tony and Mike pulled and edited all of their shots from each of the week’s assignments, it was Wendy’s job to put them into an order that created a narrative and was interesting to look at. She started editing the big pile of photos sometime in the late morning, combing through the combined individual edits, and finished the sequencing of her show sometime around 11pm. Apart from the half hour it took for us to wait for the car and travel back to the hotel, we never stopped working, even taking our lunch and dinner at our computers. In the end, though, the effort will all be worth it!
The students are going to be psyched to see their work, and the audience is sure to be impressed with the quality and narrative fidelity of these shows…they are pretty amazing.
