A Local Paradise from David Zentz on Vimeo.
I had a great time over the weekend as one of 50 photojournalists participating in the inaugural VJ Multimedia Workshop at the Brooks Institute in Ventura. I was in a group focusing on local businesses and their relationships with the community of Ventura, which is proud to be one of the few undeveloped old-school beach towns left on the California coast. Within that category I was assigned to focus on one of the owners of a local artisan wine and cheese shop called Paradise Pantry. The workshop was an intensive three-day shoot and edit session beginning with a full shooting and audio-collecting day on Friday, followed by one and a half days of editing using Final Cut Pro and then capped off with a showing of the final presentations Sunday evening. The workshop was split evenly between students and professionals who had been laid off in the past two years. I was qualified thanks to the buyout I took on my way out the door last year. Between funding my trip to Haiti and now this, that thing’s really paid off! Interspersed throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday were a series of excellent guest speakers, including one-time National Geographic picture editor and fellow Gator alumn Tom Kennedy, Dave Labelle, Wired.com’s Jim Merithew, Photoshelter co-founder and cool-last-name-haver Grover Sanschagrin and others. Multimedia is something I did a fair amount of at the Journal Star and even dating back to the St. Pete Times when I was there in 2005, so this was kind of a brush-up course that I felt I needed for lack of practice over the past year. It also gave me experience using Final Cut, which I hadn’t actually used for my previous projects. When the final show came around it was amazing to see the quality of work people were able to produce in such a short time. It turned out to be a great weekend. Another thing it did was inspire me to keep pushing myself with multimedia, which shouldn’t be a problem as it’s a form of storytelling I enjoy and something that I’ll be incorporating into future work, whether editorial or commercial. So, now I’m working on getting a multimedia showcase incorporated into my website. Hopefully it will be up in some form in the next week and will continue to get better. One thing missing from this version is an underlying soundtrack that incorporated ambient sounds. It was there for the presentation, but is now somehow gone and I can’t fix it because I don’t have Final Cut! Hopefully I’ll get a hold of a copy soon and will be able to post a corrected version.
Update
The VJ Workshop has just posted all of the projects on their website. There’s some great work there, so check it out. A version of my project with the full soundtrack can also be found there.