Irene Rojas Media • Blog

I spent the past week at the National Press Photographer Association’s Multimedia Immersion workshop in Syracuse, NY. The event started on Tuesday, when we had a series of lectures. In the afternoon, we chose our topics out of a box. This was a big difference from the only other workshop I had attended, Truth with a Camera 2006. Back then, TWAC was held in Norfolk, VA, and we had to arrive with story ideas. I liked the Immersion way better, since it allowed us more time to focus on the lectures and actually shooting.

Time… there was not enough of it. We started shooting Wednesday afternoon and continued on Thursday. During those two days, I got maybe 7 hours of sleep. Many long nights… I thought my days of being in academic buildings at 2am were behind me. Guess not.

On the very first day, Richard Koci Hernandez spoke about how this was one of the few times in our careers when we had permission to fail. His point was that most people who made a mistake during this workshop almost never made that mistake again later. Well, I made one of those mistakes. I forgot my nice headphones on the second day of shooting and had to use different headphones which didn’t block noise as well. Somewhere along the line, I forgot which audio input I was supposed to be monitoring and switched from the lav mic to the shotgun mic. The shotgun mic picked up a lot of background noise during a very important part of an interview. Frustrated as I was, on the way home from Syracuse I stopped by a Staples and bought a bunch of colored labels. When I got home, I color-coded all my audio cables and mic inputs. Now, there should be no question about which input I need to monitor at certain times. I learned that lesson the hard way.

I had some great coaches. Bruce Strong was the Final Cut guy and Liz Baylen was there for pep talks and interview advice. Those were two things I mentioned I wanted help with, and I got quite a bit.

On a different note, the roller derby women were awesome to work with. I worked with the Assault City Roller Derby team. One of them even came to the final presentation at the end of the week. As mentioned in the video, roller derby is one of the few full-contact sports for women. Those are some tough chicks. The title of the video, “Derby Girls Don’t Cry,” comes from when a crying injured roller derby player looked at me later and asked shyly, “Did you get video of me crying? Derby girls don’t cry.” I didn’t want the video to just be about roller derby. As I told the players, I didn’t want the video to be like a Wikipedia page. If that’s the information I wanted to give people, then I would just send them there. I originally started with the thoughts of the injuries as war wounds, but eventually the piece became about where roller derby fits into female culture.

This is the video I submitted at the end, except I removed the Immersion opening video. It looked like the background in the closing Immersion video. I removed it since it made me dizzy.