At the beginning of winter term documentary production students are sent out to Ottawa's annual Winterlude event for their first story exercise after Christmas break.

Here's the drill: Students go out in crews to focus on a Winterlude event of interest and bring back actuality, interviews and visuals to produce a five minute story. Each member of the crew directs a particular story element or segment and edits it. The final touch is assembling all segments which are crafted together in the edit suite to produce the group's mini doc.
Winterlude Challenge is a warm up exercise for the big one, students' final group productions of their long form documentaries.

Doc makers Justin Nalepa, Tae-eun Kim, Eric Archambault and Jean Kim-Butcher decided on a profile of Sophie Latreille, founding member of Fire Weavers, an Ottawa/Gatineau-based fire performance troupe.

As in all documentary shooting, the objective of the exercise is to come back with actuality and visuals that give the audience a sense of what it's like to be there.

Hard core occupier and documentary production student Amin Habbal is "embedded" with Occupy Ottawa. To find out why Amin is not in class, click on the image for the Algonquin Times article.

It's a tradition: Every fall documentary production students are sent out into the Byward Market to shoot their first actuality sequences and interviews.

With material they capture students create short subject docs on local characters and landmarks in the historic part of the nation's capital.

On their Market shoot, Eric Archambault, Tae-Eun Kim, Wisdom Sanni,  and Justin Nalepa set out to capture the story of local stables owner, John Cundell.

Located just on the edge of the Market, Cundell Stables have been in operation since the late 1800’s and are the only stables still left in the city’s core.

The crew rotates through various positions, everybody gets to direct, shoot and record sound.

The name of the exercise is to capture actuality, visuals and interviews and to bring back these elements to be cut into a short human interest story.

The documentary production program launched into year four with a diverse group of aspiring doc makers. Students were quickly immersed in video production fundamentals with in-class assignments shooting their first sequences and two-minute profiles of their colleagues. Next on the doc bootcamp itinearary is the annual location shoot in Ottawa's historic Byward Market. Several students have already been thrown into the baptismal fire of documentary, crewing for a doc on the college support workers' strike and shooting the tar sands action on Parliament Hill in September. Over two semesters of intense hands-on production activity students will be developing and producing short form and long form documentaries on wide-ranging topics from vanishing swans on the Rideau Canal to personal journeys of discovery. Under the guidance and tutelage of a seasoned team of doc instructors the crew of 2012 is headed for documentary adventure and discovery.

January was a busy month for our group, with six of our short films from the first term selected to open for the features at this year's Wakefield International Film Festival. Here's the roster of films that are showing:
Feb. 13 - 'Thursday Girls' by Marta Perez
Feb. 20 - 'Forged' by Josh Holmes
Feb. 27 - 'Charitable Rebels' by Camille Maheu
March. 6 - 'Karen Bailey: A Portrait' by Graham Lawford
March. 13 - 'Guard Team' by Nicole Godwin
March. 18 - 'Inapprowepriate' by Chris Plecash

Tickets can purchased  at www.theatrewakefield.ca

C.P.