Saturday, June 25, 2011

Absinthe: The Revial

One of the great things about Portland is its attitude towards art. There's a lot of art here and anyone can be an artist. You just have to find your medium. With that in mind I've started to explore my artistic side.

I started taking video classes for work to learn more about working the video camera that I used for work and lighting. Now that is an art form. Lighting isn't easy. Either you get it or you don't. Four classes later I get it, but it's still not my strong suit. It's easy to meet people in these classes because we all seem to be exploring the art of video. In one of these classes a guy turned me onto an interesting idea: Documentary Film Making.

That just sounded hard for me. My friend Barbara in New York made a documentary called Cropsey about a Staten Island legend. If you haven't seen it, you should. You can get it on Netflix. It took her years to complete the doc and when it was done it debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. So you can see why it sounded like a bit of a challenge.

The guy told me about a class he took at NW Documentary: DIY Documentary. The idea? Make a 5 minute documentary in 10 weeks that would be shown in a theater. That seemed doable and I believe the best way to learn is to do - mistakes and all. It's all useful information. So I signed up for the class and made a documentary about Absinthe. You can see the documentary by clicking this link.

The whole process was amazing. Everything from finding a story, to learning more about Absinthe, to shooting and editing the documentary. It was a lot of work, but I highly recommend it.

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