My Platypus

Posted in The Creative Side on April 6, 2010

One press of a button freezes a moment in time. I look through my viewfinder, compose, focus and click. Recompose, check the light, focus and click again. A still photograph is made. Now imagine that you can hear sound watch as the subject moves inside the frame. This is motion.

In April 2010, I attended the 38th Platypus workshop in Las Vegas, Nevada. The workshop, taught by former White House photographers Dirck Halstead and PF Bentley, is generally regarded as the gold-standard video training for still photographers. They taught us that film exists as temporal medium and must fit into a timeline. Thus, there are certain rules by which one must abide while filming – always let the camera roll for 10 seconds, shoot and move, shoot and move, get tons of b-roll, vary your angles (point-of-view angles, wide, medium, tight and tighter), monitor your audio levels, and don’t break the 180 degree rule. Oh yeah, and ALWAYS use a tripod. The learning curve was steeper and longer than the stairs of Angkor Wat.

There were 12 students in the workshop, whose collective photography experience includes war, the White House, weddings, fashion, commercial and newspapers. In the medium of video, however, we were all at square one. The experience was collegial and collaborative. We all struggled. We all wrestled with, what seemed like, oversized, clunky tripods, we became tangled in headphone and microphone cables and had varying degrees of success depending upon the day and exercise.

We had multiple exercises throughout the week leading up to our final projects, the capstone of our Platypus experience, the award-winning short. Or not. Each student chose a final project pitched it to PF and Dirck during the “pitch party,” which was really not a party at all. Nevertheless, one-by-one each student had received the green light to begin the one-day filming.

In the morning we all set off to do our projects and began trickling in some 8 to 10 hours later, exhausted and spent. By the following morning, all had returned from the field, and the logging, editing and general Final Cut brooding and cursing began. Final Cut Pro is a powerful editing program, and learning to edit your first project is reminiscent to cutting ones own hair – one misguided snip leads to another, which ultimately ends in a tearful disaster.

After about a day and a half of this and two deadline extensions, we were forced to handover our projects for viewing. My project was 2:05 in length and took 12 hours to shoot, and about 20 hours to edit. I enjoyed watching all the projects. We all had successes and made mistakes, but overall the projects were quite impressive for being the newbies that we were! Thanks PF and Dirck and the various classroom assistants, Scott, Greg, and Jason, who helped me with the steep hills!