Acceptance ©2010 by Hannele Lahti from teaching multimedia on Vimeo.

A birthday brings Teisha Jones face to face with an important date in her family’s past.

Camera, Sound and editing by Hannele Lahti in a week in August 2010 as part of Bob Sacha’s Multimedia Master Class at the Maine Media Workshops.

I had the pleasure of leading nine very eager photographers, young and old, through some “assignments” near Santa Fe, New Mexico as part of a National Geographic Expeditions Photography Workshop .

Enjoy this short excerpt from the final slide show with photographs the students made at Eve’s Movie Ranch. It’s the first student slide show I’ve assembled on deadline using Final Cut Pro.

Just finished a week at the SantaFe Workshops with 11 students in Visual Storytelling with Audio . It was exhausting and exhilarating, in part because everyone worked so hard and made some really interesting (short) stories. This was pretty much the first time for these students to record a story, edit the audio, shoot, edit and tone the images and create a (short) multimedia piece. And they each did three pieces in the week.

The fun part was the reaction of other students after the final show. Several people came up to me with the same question: “Where did they find those people?” Secret is that the joy was not in finding the people but being able to get the people you meet everyday to relate their stories on tape and in photos.

All of the stories produced in class were wonderful but bandwidth allows me to share just two (short) stories. Neither story is quite what it seems. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Josh Schachter’s Josie-Pie-O-Neer about SantaFe institution Josie Gallegos

and Lauren Hemerle’s tale about her Mom’s gardener, Jose Amormino.

A super shout out to Joe Weiss and SoundSlides, who helped by allowing us to use his program. I very much wanted this class to be about storytelling and not software and the ease of Soundslides made that possible. Thanks Joe!

I will say they’re quick: Interesting how they automatically re-enacted the famous opening shot from Reservoir Dogs when I turned around to shoot them on the street in Queens last week.

One thing that’s cool about this player is that it scales the movie up to the size of the player. Here I scaled it 2x. I know this needs work but it’s fun to deliver it as such a big movie with a custom designed interface.

Curious to know what you think about the quality vs. size.

The nine students ranged from professional photographers to fine artists to teachers to advanced amateurs. It was a great group and they worked long hours using the Zoom H4 recorder and AudioTechnica mics, Audacity, IView Media Pro and Soundslides Plus in addition to their digital still cameras.

In a single day, each student recorded, photographed, edited, mixed and output a multimedia show. On the second day they found a new story and recorded, photographed, edited, mixed and output a new multimedia show. Then on the third day created another new multimedia piece from scratch. Their heads must have been spinning but each piece got better and better.

While you can see the entire show below –and everyone did extremely well– here these are two of my favorite Visual Storytelling with Audio pieces:

Rick Scibelli: Last Spring

Julie Skarratt: In This Moment

Visual Storytelling with Audio 2007 class

This is the final show with everyone’s work from the class, including Julie and Rick’s piece. It’s 14.53 long.

Please remember that before this class, no one had ever recorded much audio or produced a multimedia show by themselves. I think they did a fantastic job.

(Thanks to Joe Weiss for letting us use SoundSlides Plus, his new supercharged –and very cool– version of the classic media production tool that makes slide shows simple and now creates work that looks more and more like you’ve slaved away in Final Cut Pro )

Why did I do it? Well, to create work like The Soul Of Athens which launched today. I produced the content for the creativity section.

I shot and edited The Art of Coal Country about how Nelsonville, Ohio was saved by art. It’s my vision of how a typical newspaper feature story can look on the web.

Soul of Athens is our attempt to look at where “merlot meets moonshine,” an multimedia examination of Athens County and our small University town in the foot hills of Appalachia.

This is a class project, totally created by students but the brainchild of the amazing Zach Wise , the 29-year-old visiting professional who has guided it, kept us on track and constantly tweaked and prodded us into the best we could do in 8 weeks.

Zach pretty much allowed us to generate and create and build every bit, from concept to design to code to content to text to viral marketing. Another web guru, Brian Storm flew in from NYC to be our second guiding light.

What was most interesting for me was to be involved as a producer and generate pieces that I did not shoot myself (though I did edit them all.)

For Harmony in Two Parts , a story on the creative process between 2 musicians, I generated the idea and worked with M.K.Smith, who photographed and recorded the piece. I made the edit

For PassionWorks a story about an eye-opening art studio for developmentally disadvantaged adults, and The Carver of Coolville Ridge, a story about David Hostetler, an internationally recognized sculptor who lives nearby, I found work already in progress and matched it to ideas I generated. So I have now also learned the fine art of begging and pleading for rights and cooperation. I re-edited the pieces for the web.

And it’s pretty much what I came here to learn. I couldn’t be happier. Love to hear what you think.