I am in Maine for the week teaching my Final Cut X class. The Maine Media Workshops is a place to go to take week long classes on topics related to photography and film/video. The classes on offer this week are: Portrait Lighting Techniques, Creativity and Invention in Photoshop, The Large Format Narrative Portrait, Designing Interactive Publications, Camera Operator, Final Cut Pro, DIT on Set, The Director's Craft, plus the 2nd week of Four Week Film School. We all eat 3 meals a day together under the tent so in addition to my own students I've had a chance to meet students and instructors from the other classes as well. So I'm surrounded all day by creative and happy people. It's really kind of fantastic.
The class is going well. I have 4 students and all of them are starting at the same place of entirely novice. And none of them are doing it in a professional setting. Though I think 2 are exploring the idea to see if they would maybe like to do it professionally. That's pretty unusual for me. Before this my 3 or 5 day classes have always been for students who need to do it for work. And my semester classes for people who want to do it professionally at least in the "other duties as assigned" sense. This is so much more relaxed. They want to learn it, they've all brought along their own footage to play with in our afternoon sessions of "real world applications", but none of them have paychecks or promotions riding on how much they can cram into their heads this week.
One of the best things about this week is that I'm remembering how much I love teaching. Here is this thing I love to do and I'm going to show it to you so that you can love it too. Being on the student side of it for the last year, and particularly with the pressure at the end of the semester, I think I had forgotten. I was sort of struck last night by how much I was thinking "This is great!" If I'm only going to get one week of work this summer I'm glad this was the week.
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