The Insights of Angels: Race and Love (multimedia)

Los Angeles Times staff photographer Liz O. Baylen recently completed this project for the Mountain Workshops, an annual documentary workshop in Kentucky. The workshops are put on by Western Kentucky University and include components for photography, picture editing, and now multimedia. Participants are sent out to document a new town each year. St. Petersburg Times staff photographer Kathleen Flynn and multimedia producer Carrie Pratt are on the workshop's staff, volunteering their time for the past several years. Liz spoke with us recently about her experience shooting her story: The Insights of Angels.

First, tell me about yourself and your professional background.

I started out as a magazine journalism major in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. But early on, during a stint as a reporter for the school paper, I quickly realized it was difficult to cover the ground I wanted to in writing alone. I’ve always been drawn to good stories but found that photography was the only sure-fire way I could avoid the “telephone journalism” I abhorred. As a photographer, I didn’t have to fight editors for face time with subjects; it was a given that it was necessary.

So I switched into OU’s School of Visual Communications and completed internships at the Toledo Blade and The Washington Times. In 2001, I graduated early to take a staff position at The Washington Times where I continued my education surrounded by excellent photographers and editors. After five years there and some great experience, I quit to move to New York and try my hand at freelancing. After two years of freelancing primarily for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, I was offered a staff position at the Los Angeles Times. I have been in LA for two years now. [Click "see more photos" below to continue reading.]

Tell me what inspired you to attend the Mountain Workshops?

As a freelancer in New York, I tried to learn audio gathering and editing as well as how to use Final Cut Pro; however, I had been learning this on my own with no formal training. When I got to the Times, I was thrust into doing multimedia projects. Although always up for a challenge, I realized that there was still so much I wanted and needed to learn. The Times offered a crash course in video and editing which gave me a better foundation to build on. However, in practice I resorted back to what I was comfortable with--audio/still image slide shows.

More recently, however, I teamed up with one of our excellent staff videographers, Katy Newton, to do still images for a project she conceived. This collaboration had us brainstorming into the night, visualizing story constructs and planning interviews, leaving me energized and excited.

Katy’s way of seeing the bigger picture, and by that I mean how she envisioned all the pieces fitting together to form a complete online project, astounded and impressed me. I had very little experience with multimedia outside of the pieces I’d produced alone, and looking back, I’d now say a limited vision of what could possibly have been accomplished.

What made me consider the Mountain Workshops was that I realized in doing this project with Katy that I wanted to be able to better contribute to the multimedia conversation I shared with her during our collaboration. Although Katy and I were seeing with similar eyes and feeling the story with similar hearts, when it came down to articulating the way the project materialized I felt at a loss for words. I simply didn’t have the vocabulary that I wanted to have. And I felt that without an understanding and true grasp of video, along with the tools associated with it, I would always be at a disadvantage in communicating ideas and engaging in a constructive dialogue with my talented videojournalist colleagues. So given what I was told the workshop might offer, I enrolled.

Tell me about your workshop experience, having been a still photographer who is just beginning to embrace video/multimedia. (If you've been doing multimedia for a long time, just tell me about your transition.)

I love NPR; I love the crisp voices and the clear storytelling. I’ve been working with audio for about two years now. Right before workshop, I checked out one of our 5Ds to play with and shoot a few scenes to mix with an audio slideshow I finished right before heading off to workshop; however, I soon found out at workshop that the way I had worked the video into the piece was completely time-consuming and wrong. Kind of like learning a golf swing incorrectly…it can be ferociously difficult to correct!

At the workshop, I was one of 8 multimedia students. We all came to the class with different levels of experience in multimedia. Originally we were split into two groups each led by one of our two instructors, Bob Sacha or Chad A. Stevens; however, very quickly we morphed into one happy family. The first day, after getting a crash course on the gear we were loaned, introduction lectures and a class meeting, we were sent out to conduct intro interviews with the subject we’d chosen randomly from a hat. Although we were allowed to shoot the first day, we were encouraged rather to explore and plan. The message that every minute of a finished piece takes approximately 12 hours to produce, encouraged me to focus before shooting and calculate. During our approximately two and a half days of shooting we were checking in with our instructors, talking about story-direction and basically staying on track and afloat. Of course, we had certain deadlines to meet for having an audio script finished, etc. After the evening lectures, we got together as a class and Bob and Chad taught us different skills we needed to know along the way as well as showed us exciting pieces as motivation. Then we’d talk stories—our stories. It was such an exhilarating experience hearing all the different critiques; it reminded me of the energy I had during class critique in college. I can’t say enough about the support and comradery we shared with our instructors and in our multimedia group.

Why this project, The Insights of Angels? What inspired you about this story?

All of the students were assigned to very general stories by literally picking them out of a hat. The subject I received was a large home-schooling family – which on its own was interesting. The family had also adopted a young boy and girl within the last two years. But what struck me the most, after my initial visit to the family, was the relationship between Abby and her newly adopted sister, Joyce. Their relationship was special and I chose to focus my energy into telling this angle of the story.

What did you learn?

What didn’t I learn?! From the story, I met a family who puts into practice what most people only preach—-sharing, unconditional love, the importance of education, and open-mindedness. Who can’t take a lesson from that?

From the workshop, I left Kentucky nothing less than completely inspired. My teachers, Bob Sacha and Chad Stevens were INCREDIBLE. I don’t know how they were able to fit in as much as they did! Perhaps because they kept us all so inspired, we favored working over sleeping that week! Regardless, I felt like they taught me invaluable lessons in video story-telling, efficiency, work flow, and editing as well as gave me an amazingly comprehensive start to a language I plan to never let get rusty. I came out of the workshop revived and hungry to see differently and to work in new mediums.

And I learned that this is what I want to continue doing from here on out.

What do you want to carry forth in your work for the Los Angeles Times? What do you want to convey to your viewers? What are your plans in the future? Why is this important?

I want to collaborate with our video-journalists more often as well as generate my own projects. I love the still photography work I have the opportunity to do for our newspaper and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. We have some of the best photo display in the nation and nothing makes a photographer beam more than seeing their work played huge in the paper. But the web offers unique ways to engage our viewers and I want to capitalize on that as well. So if an idea for a great story told on video strikes me, I want to take comfort in knowing that I not only have the venue for it, but also the skills in which it takes to tell that story whether it be on my own or with my colleagues.

Though these are rough times for newspapers, and staffs are being thinned to a critical point, there are still important stories that need to be told. I consider getting those stories out there, by whatever means necessary, my responsibility. And I am not the only one at the Times who feels this way – we have an entire staff of people dedicated to the same cause.

As I grow as a multimedia storyteller, I hope to add to the discussion of how to more directly, intimately and uniquely bring stories to the public bridging the gap between traditional and non-traditional media. What is important to me is the voice of the subject. My job is to get that voice out there and to do so in a way that gets that voice heard by as many people as possible. My responsibility is to the Times readership – as they count on our staff to bring them information that is important. I don’t want to let them down.

The Mountain Workshop, the opportunity to learn from Chad and Bob, and being engaged by the ideas of my fellow students/colleagues, has inspired me to push harder and expect more of myself so that I can deliver better for the readership I serve.