Today was an interesting day for the instructors. (The last day before the ceremony always is!) This morning we all went over to the classroom for our last critique. The images from the medicine story yesterday were amazing, and there really was some incredibly touching stuff. They did such a good job and we knew heading into this afternoon that we were going to have some tough work ahead of us.
After the critique we had something special prepared: our TAs got to present their work as a slideshow just like all of the other instructors. Each of the advanced students picked 5 of their favorite images from the Advanced Workshop last week and presented them on the screen for the beginner’s class to enjoy. Just like the instructors, the TAs had to talk about the images they chose to show, why they picked them, and talk the students through the creative process behind each image. The beginner students cheered loudly for the advanced kids as they finished.
After the TA slideshows, all of the instructors headed back to the hotel for the “big dig.” While the students spent the afternoon writing and rehearsing their speeches for the graduation ceremony, all of the instructors were going back through all 40,000+ images the students had shot to pull an edit for each of the stories and for each of the students to show at graduation. You see, we do this every workshop. At the end of the week, we go back and edit out the students images so that we can create 5 different slideshows of their work: one Best of the Week show for each group, four 5-minute shows, and one “Stories of the Week” compilation of all of our assignments, a 10-13 minute show. We have to edit all of the pictures, then sequence each of the stories and then create the slideshow videos complete with music, credit slides, titles and information slides. It ends up being a lot of work every time… but this time we had a new approach.
Well, the new approach worked OK, but it still had its kinks. In the end, all six instructors worked on the edit and sequencing portion of the videos from around 1pm-11pm and then I finished up creating the videos in Adobe Premiere. It was a long day, but surely tomorrow it will all be worth it when the students get to share with pride the work that they’ve made this week…