MIDDLEBURY — The Vermont Folklife Center will hold a workshop, titled “Crafting Community Video Projects,” on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 25 and 26. The workshop will give participants the opportunity to create a short multi-media documentary project from start to finish.
Running from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day at VFC headquarters in Middlebury, the workshop will begin with conceptualizing a piece and end with publishing it digitally. The workshop will also survey ethics, aesthetics, and technique before developing and producing a project.
With historic Middlebury as the location, workshop participants will use photography, video and audio recording to create a unique and artistic media piece that reflects the character of the place, the values of the local residents, and the aesthetics of the filmmakers.
Day One: The first morning the group will decide on a topic and then create a project structure — leading to a storyboard — to plan how various media (still images, audio, and moving images) will blend to form the piece. In the afternoon participants will go outside and work in teams recording around town, some shooting stills, others pursuing interviews, others recording ambient audio or shooting video.
Day Two: This day will be dedicated to editing the project using Final Cut Pro. Familiarity with the software and Macintosh computers is recommended, but not required. Participants will work in groups of two to edit individual aspects of the project as decided on the original storyboard. By the afternoon the groups will reconvene to put the components together and upload the finished piece onto Vimeo for the world to see.
Class size is limited. For registration and tuition information call (802) 388-4964 or visit www.vermontfolklifecenter.org. The deadline for registration is Oct. 22.
?Instructor Scott Miller is a documentary photographer and filmmaker originally from Vermont and Kenya. He has extensive international field experience, having completed photographic and ethnographic projects in Kerala, India; southern Spain, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Queens, N.Y.
Miller holds an MA from The New School (NYC) in international affairs and ethnographic studies and a BA in philosophy from Boston University. He is the Vermont Folklife Center’s digital media instructor, mentoring documentary media projects with students in grades 4 through 12 in schools around the state.