What do you get when you take 20 video workshop participants from across the country (and Canada), 5 coaches (plus one fearless leader), 20 story ideas (including THREE with chickens as central characters), and put them in a room full of fun-sized Snickers in Kentucky for five days? Camp for grown ups.
I know, it’s a ridiculous comparison when you consider how much work is done during those five days — The participants are reporting and shooting from dawn ’til dusk. Then they return to workshop headquarters to join the other 50+ participants from the photojournalism, picture editing, data visualization, and time lapse workshops for an evening of presentations, and THEN we corral them into our little corner and stuff them full of all the storytelling goodness we can before we all start to look and sound like zombies well passed midnight. Shower, rinse, repeat. For five days.
But if you were a fly on the wall when we all said our final goodbyes after the final finished piece had been shown (coaches BEAMING with pride), I swear you would say to yourself, “Yep, I remember that feeling. Summer Camp.”
It’s pretty remarkable to watch students put into practice the concepts you’re teaching. And to see their technical skills, and more importantly, storytelling abilities grow hour-by-hour, day-by-day is just plain inspiring. Add to that starting and ending each day, crammed into a chauffeured minivan with my co-coaches Alex Garcia, Cary Wagner, Lauren Frohne, and Liz Baylen, STILL discussing the students’ stories and how best to push them to really improve. Man. It doesn’t get much better than that.
After a week of getting almost as little sleep as my maternity-leave-bound business partner (emphasis on almost), I can honestly say I’m not sure when I’ve felt so refreshed and energized.
So. All that to say, do a workshop. This one is particularly special. But do a workshop. Your skills and your psyche (and maybe even your portfolio), will be so glad that you did.
For a little taste of what I’m talking about, watch this behind the scenes video produced by the Mountain Workshops crew:
And check out the beautiful work produced by this year’s participants at mountainworkshops.org
