| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
|
| 00:18 | Richard: Telling a story, for me, is breathing.
|
| 00:25 | It doesn't matter how I do it, if it's
in motion graphics, if it's a picture, if
|
| 00:28 | it's a piece of video--whatever it is.
|
| 00:31 | (Music playing.)
|
| 00:41 | The foundation is story and storytelling.
|
| 00:42 | That's never going to change.
|
| 00:44 | Since they who have been putting
pictures on cave walls, it's the story;
|
| 00:49 | that's what's most important.
|
| 00:52 | (Music playing.)
|
| 01:09 | There is a need in me to take pictures.
|
| 01:15 | When I have a camera in my hands, my
head and I hope my heart are connecting
|
| 01:20 | in a way that says, "Press that button,
press that button," and I do, and it
|
| 01:25 | feels amazing.
|
| 01:26 | (Music playing.)
|
| 01:40 | It's the art, for me, of discovery.
|
| 01:42 | I love to discover: new
things, new places, new people.
|
| 01:46 | It's just that.
|
| 01:47 | It's like, what could it be, what could it be?
|
| 01:49 | What's around that corner? Oh my gosh,
look at that. Oh, look at that!
|
| 01:53 | Click. Boom. Move on, and just keep over
and over and over and over again.
|
| 01:57 | (Music playing.)
|
| 01:58 | (Music playing.)
|
| 02:32 | Richard: Oh boy, nice and quiet.
|
| 02:34 | Tavio and Hadley.
|
| 02:37 | Richard: Good morning!
Female Speaker 1: Good morning!
|
| 02:40 | Richard: Hello! Good morning Lydia!
Lydia: How are you?
|
| 02:42 | Richard: Good! How are you?
Lydia: Good!
|
| 02:45 | Richard: Oh! We had the old league.
|
| 02:46 | This is closer to really,
really what we are going for.
|
| 02:48 | Lydia: And this means from the latest?
|
| 02:50 | Richard: Yeah. It's basically all the--
it's the same structure we've always had.
|
| 02:55 | Lydia: Mhm.
Richard: So we can break this up.
|
| 02:58 | This can be the blogs.
|
| 02:59 | You can have a feed here.
|
| 03:00 | Richard: You can have an--you can
have two different elements here.
|
| 03:03 | Lydia: Mhm.
Richard: It will show comments associated.
|
| 03:06 | Richard: So if you click, it will show all their stories.
Lydia: Oh, that's great!
|
| 03:08 | Richard: And if they put in their
|
| 03:10 | Richard: Twitter, it will show that they twittered,
Lydia: Oh, that's excellent!
|
| 03:12 | Richard: and we can kind of add in something.
Lydia: Wow! It's cool! Very cool!
|
| 03:15 | Richard: I think it's so much cleaner.
Lydia: I do too.
|
| 03:17 | Lydia: Yeah, because they want it--
Richard: And there is a lot more.
|
| 03:19 | I got involved with Mission Loc@l
before it was Mission Loc@l. There was no
|
| 03:23 | Mission Loc@l. The newspaper
industry, especially in the Bay Area, has
|
| 03:30 | essentially collapsed.
|
| 03:32 | Reporters have been laid off.
|
| 03:35 | Coverage areas have shrinked just to the core.
|
| 03:38 | And there are communities, like the
Mission, like Richmond, California, like
|
| 03:41 | Oakland, California, who don't have
anybody reporting for them anymore.
|
| 03:47 | So can we come in as a group of
committed journalists and students who want to learn?
|
| 03:53 | And essentially, what this is is it's
a little startup that's trying to cover
|
| 03:58 | the Mission District as a community
with sound journalism, new ways of
|
| 04:04 | telling stories.
|
| 04:05 | We will try anything.
|
| 04:06 | And I think I'm happy to be here
because those are a little bit of my roots.
|
| 04:11 | We're all--I'm learning as I'm here.
|
| 04:13 | We are just running on the seat of our
pants, putting this whole thing together.
|
| 04:19 | It's fun, it's exciting, and it's something new.
|
| 04:22 | (Male Speaker in video: --only to discover
that she thinks she's a guardian of the galaxy.)
|
| 04:26 | Oh! Brilliant! Brilliant!
|
| 04:31 | (Male Speaker in video: I don't know. Clean it up.)
|
| 04:32 | (Female Speaker in video: I'm
going to look at the possibilities.)
|
| 04:34 | Richard: Yes, I love it!
|
| 04:36 | Richard: Do you have the original version somewhere?
Female Speaker 2: Yeah.
|
| 04:39 | Richard: Keep it.
|
| 04:40 | One, for me, now I know that I can be
a little harsher and honest, and it's
|
| 04:46 | going to work in the end.
|
| 04:47 | This is so much better than what it was.
|
| 04:50 | Female Speaker 3: I am trying to
do this audio slideshow on a band.
|
| 04:52 | Richard: Yeah.
|
| 04:53 | Female Speaker 3: I am talking to them
today, separately, some of the band members.
|
| 04:56 | Richard: Right.
Female Speaker 3: But tomorrow I am going to be shooting their show.
|
| 04:59 | Richard: Okay, a live show?
|
| 05:01 | Female Speaker 3: Live show, really dark.
Richard: Okay.
|
| 05:02 | Richard: Okay.
Female Speaker 3: Any...What can I do?
|
| 05:05 | Richard: Is this what you are going to be using?
Female Speaker 3: Mhm.
|
| 05:09 | Richard: What you are going to do for audio?
|
| 05:12 | Your audio slideshow is going to be
about what, them as a band or just
|
| 05:16 | their performance?
|
| 05:16 | Female Speaker 3: It's why they are really
good musicians who continue to just play the
|
| 05:20 | Mission week after week.
|
| 05:22 | Richard: You guys are living
the--be the black-and-white.
|
| 05:25 | I have noticed the front
page--which is good though!
|
| 05:27 | It's a good choice. I love--
|
| 05:28 | Male Speaker 1: Well, she only does black tattoo work,
|
| 05:31 | Male Speaker 1: so it's kind of natural.
Richard: Super-smart.
|
| 05:33 | Richard: So you double-click on the clip.
|
| 05:36 | And then you go Effects.
|
| 05:38 | My passion is a new breed of
journalist, a new breed of storyteller.
|
| 05:45 | My mission here at Mission Loc@l
is to really create that kind of
|
| 05:50 | entrepreneurial storyteller who is not
afraid to try anything, who knows that
|
| 05:57 | the rug will be pulled out from
underneath their feet every five years.
|
| 06:01 | The tools will change, the way we do
things change, the way we deliver things
|
| 06:05 | will change, and that that doesn't scare them.
|
| 06:06 | I don't care if you use an app on your
iPhone to take a picture or you use film
|
| 06:12 | and you spent five hours in
the darkroom to get this print;
|
| 06:15 | all it boils down to is really the story,
the story of my life and the story I
|
| 06:20 | am trying to tell of other people's lives.
|
| 06:22 | And if I can be that little bug in the
students' ears to keep reminding them
|
| 06:26 | about that, then I think I will have
fit in well here and done a decent job
|
| 06:32 | at the end of the day.
|
| 06:36 | (Music playing.)
|
| 07:09 | Richard: Being in a house full of women,
there were men there, but they weren't
|
| 07:12 | influential in any way.
|
| 07:13 | It was the woman--my grandmother, my
mother--who really, really raised me.
|
| 07:20 | The one father figure that was around
was an uncle, Uncle David, and he brought
|
| 07:26 | us here to Yosemite when I was 12
years old, and I haven't been back since.
|
| 07:35 | (Music playing.)
|
| 07:51 | This is the birthplace of my visual career.
|
| 07:54 | I mean this is--everything that I am
right now as a photographer and as a visual
|
| 08:05 | storyteller started right here.
|
| 08:08 | I mean this is it, and it
was powerful when I was 12.
|
| 08:13 | It's even more powerful now at 40.
|
| 08:22 | I have my routes in my left hand
and the future in my right hand.
|
| 08:25 | I mean there is still magic in this.
|
| 08:30 | I can't see anything.
|
| 08:31 | I have to wait.
I have to develop the film.
|
| 08:36 | I love technology.
|
| 08:37 | This is fantastic!
|
| 08:40 | (Music playing.)
|
| 08:57 | Uncle David brought me out here,
and we just kind of started stumbling around
|
| 09:01 | and coming to the village to kind of
have ice cream and just keep ourselves
|
| 09:07 | occupied, and eventually we land
here at the Ansel Adams gallery.
|
| 09:12 | We are just kind of stumbled upon it.
|
| 09:28 | Half Dome is Yosemite, and Half Dome
is the icon of this place, and while we
|
| 09:35 | were here, that's what we
were looking at all the time.
|
| 09:38 | And then to walk in here and to see
this picture of it was so powerful, and to
|
| 09:45 | know that I could walk right outside
and do, potentially--what did I know?
|
| 09:52 | I was 12-- potentially do the
same thing was extremely powerful.
|
| 09:59 | I mean, I left this building, and I
just grabbed the camera off my uncle's
|
| 10:03 | shoulder, and it was game on.
|
| 10:04 | It was--I wanted to do this.
|
| 10:16 | This is it. This is the camera.
|
| 10:17 | This is the G Yashica, the Electro 35.
|
| 10:20 | This is the camera that I
pulled off my uncle's shoulder.
|
| 10:25 | I mean this is the slide.
This is the remaining piece.
|
| 10:29 | This is part of that first roll.
|
| 10:31 | It's the only surviving image, and it's
a picture taken right about here of Half Dome.
|
| 10:37 | And I brought it because I really want
to be able to take a picture of it with
|
| 10:42 | this camera, right around the spot where I was.
|
| 10:49 | I wonder if things have changed,
but this is pretty darn close.
|
| 10:55 | The light was different,
but this is pretty awesome.
|
| 10:57 | I am going to focus here. Right there.
|
| 11:19 | That's it.
|
| 11:24 | His picture of Half Dome isn't about Half Dome.
|
| 11:27 | It's about, to me, what
Ansel brought to the table.
|
| 11:33 | And it's about what's
really behind the photograph.
|
| 11:36 | It's the unspeakable.
|
| 11:38 | It's really what it is to me.
|
| 11:40 | Great photography and great
photographs are--which Ansel's are--you look at
|
| 11:46 | them and you feel something.
|
| 11:48 | You don't say something.
|
| 11:51 | You really feel something.
|
| 11:52 | And I was really fortunate that that
feeling came to me when I was 12, and it's
|
| 11:59 | still kind of with me today.
|
| 12:01 | I mean this is like
breathing, man, just to do this.
|
| 12:05 | I mean, you have no idea how excited I
was to be able to just to bring this out
|
| 12:08 | and just to do that.
|
| 12:11 | That was just pretty powerful for me.
|
| 12:20 | (Music playing.)
|
| 12:38 | Richard: When I got home from Yosemite,
my day-to-day life changed in a way.
|
| 12:45 | I always had a camera in my hand.
|
| 12:47 | That's how it changed. Always.
|
| 12:49 | I mean there is a picture here,
and there is me with a camera.
|
| 12:54 | At that point in my life--12, 13, 14--I
was in middle school and getting ready
|
| 12:58 | to go to high school, and life was
fairly crazy at home, and I was able to have
|
| 13:05 | the opportunity to go--oh gosh,
there's my yearbook--to the seminary, which
|
| 13:10 | was when I was 14. Yeah, 14.
|
| 13:14 | I left home to go to Queen of Angels
Catholic, all boys, sleepover seminary,
|
| 13:21 | don't have to go home on the weekends if
you don't want to, and carried that--I
|
| 13:26 | mean, I found a place.
|
| 13:27 | I found a home there because of photography.
|
| 13:30 | I became like this photo nerd.
|
| 13:32 | In fact, of course here it is, flip right to it.
|
| 13:36 | Editor of photography, Richard Hernandez.
|
| 13:38 | And look, surrounded by cameras in high school.
|
| 13:41 | So I go from 12, pulling a camera off
the shoulders of my uncle, never letting
|
| 13:47 | go, right to shooting pictures of
family, right into high school, right into
|
| 13:53 | cameras all over again.
|
| 13:54 | It's amazing, as I look at this, my
future was probably very much wrapped in the
|
| 14:01 | idea of being a priest, believe it or not,
and I took a break from the seminary.
|
| 14:06 | And I was really, didn't know what I was
going to do, and the only thing I knew,
|
| 14:09 | the only thing I was certain that I
could do that I knew was photography.
|
| 14:14 | I said, oh! I can work at a camera shop.
|
| 14:17 | I can sell these things, I know that.
|
| 14:19 | I can sell film and paper and cameras.
|
| 14:21 | So I went to work at a camera
shop, selling cameras and film, and
|
| 14:26 | developing film and whatnot.
|
| 14:27 | And there was a friend there, somebody
that turned into a really close friend,
|
| 14:34 | and I don't know what got into us.
|
| 14:36 | We just said, "I'll be the first
one to work at the Star Free Press."
|
| 14:39 | He was like, "No, you won't.
|
| 14:40 | I will!" and we were like, "Okay, game on!"
|
| 14:43 | And that night I drove to RadioShack
and bought a scanner because I thought the
|
| 14:50 | Star Free Press, the local newspaper,
if you wanted to be a photographer there,
|
| 14:55 | you shot pictures of accident.
|
| 14:56 | That's what I thought it was all about.
|
| 14:58 | So that's what I started doing.
|
| 15:00 | I had a scanner.
|
| 15:01 | Probably around this time I'm sure
that it's so old, it doesn't turn on.
|
| 15:06 | I got so good at this.
|
| 15:08 | I rolled on every lame fire, every
accident in Ventura County that you
|
| 15:15 | could possibly imagine.
|
| 15:17 | This is what I thought photojournalism was.
|
| 15:19 | This is what I did to basically win this
bet to be the first one to get a job at
|
| 15:25 | the Star Free Press.
|
| 15:26 | Listening to the scanners,
sleeping with the scanner on.
|
| 15:32 | This obsessiveness with a camera, it
paid off for me in a way I never thought it would.
|
| 15:37 | In the middle of the
night, the scanner went off.
|
| 15:40 | It was drizzling, and I picked up my
camera, took my scanner, went there to put
|
| 15:45 | more images in my collection,
I suppose, and win the bet.
|
| 15:49 | And this guy looked at me, and he
looked, and he kept looking, and he was
|
| 15:54 | like--he knew he was the
only one that should be there.
|
| 15:56 | He was the official
photographer for the Star Free Press.
|
| 15:58 | He knew he was the only photographer
that should be there, right, and he was
|
| 16:00 | like, who is this other person?
|
| 16:02 | There's no other paper in town, absolutely.
|
| 16:06 | Who is this person?
|
| 16:07 | Should not be here.
|
| 16:09 | And he came up, and he said,
"What are you doing here?"
|
| 16:11 | And I said, "Well, I am just taking
pictures, and I don't really know what I'm doing.
|
| 16:16 | I am taking pictures, trying to win a bet."
|
| 16:18 | And he pulled out his business card and
he gave me his business card. He said,
|
| 16:21 | "You know, you're out here, risking
your own equipment, getting wet at three in
|
| 16:25 | the morning to take pictures."
|
| 16:28 | He said, "I want you to give me a
call tomorrow," and it happened to be the
|
| 16:32 | Director of Photography at the Star
Free Press at the time, and I went in the
|
| 16:38 | next day with a portfolio of this: proof sheets.
|
| 16:44 | And I just thought this
was going to be my ticket in.
|
| 16:46 | I was going to win the bet.
|
| 16:48 | And he looked at me and politely put
everything aside, clearly not impressed
|
| 16:55 | with all the work I had done, but was
able to offer me, right then and there, a
|
| 16:59 | job mixing chemistry, basically what
we might call tech support now for the
|
| 17:06 | photographers, and that's how I started.
|
| 17:09 | That was my--the next day I came in to
work, and so I made--I was able to make a
|
| 17:16 | fairly seamless jump from the seminary
and this life, and photography took me
|
| 17:23 | kind of over that bridge one more time,
and it brought me to a place that is
|
| 17:30 | really my roots are at the Star
Free Press in terms of journalism.
|
| 17:36 | And I think that's really where I
started thinking about journalism and
|
| 17:41 | photojournalism, and probably really
felt then that that was going to be my
|
| 17:47 | calling, that I was
switching from one to another.
|
| 17:51 | So that was pretty pivotal,
and photography was there again to bring me
|
| 17:56 | through that.
|
| 17:58 | (Music playing.)
|
| 18:24 | Really though, there is nothing like this smell,
absolutely nothing like this smell in here
|
| 18:29 | in the dark.
|
| 18:30 | I mean this is the other birthplace.
|
| 18:33 | I spent so much time in the
darkroom, it's unbelievable.
|
| 18:36 | I mean, I started here, mixing
chemistry and being taught how to do all this stuff.
|
| 18:41 | I mean, this is amazing, isn't it?
|
| 18:43 | I mean the hours I spent here
doing this stuff is outrageous.
|
| 18:50 | There is a red light here.
|
| 18:53 | This is a darkroom like any other darkroom.
|
| 18:56 | This is the Ventura Star darkroom.
|
| 18:58 | It's every other darkroom I have
made in my house and everywhere else.
|
| 19:03 | I mean this is really the
roots of where it all began.
|
| 19:06 | This is where I learned everything,
the magic and discovery of watching
|
| 19:10 | something develop in a tray.
|
| 19:13 | It's a lot more hands-on too, which was amazing.
|
| 19:16 | And quietly I come back here, and I
still print and I still work and develop
|
| 19:24 | film and keep a little bit of that
going because it's really so important.
|
| 19:30 | There is really nothing like it.
|
| 19:31 | In a real importance sense, I'm sad
that this will eventually be gone.
|
| 19:37 | I'm lucky that darkrooms still exist,
that I can sneak into a darkroom and do
|
| 19:41 | some of this, because it's my
beginnings, but because I still think it's very
|
| 19:46 | important stuff to do.
|
| 19:47 | (Music playing.)
|
| 20:03 | Ventura County Star Free Press on
Ralston Street, sincerely Gary Phelps, said this--
|
| 20:09 | hopefully this is not embarrassing.
|
| 20:10 | "I hired Richard Hernandez one year ago,
and in that time, he has proven to be a
|
| 20:14 | young outstanding shooter.
|
| 20:16 | At the age of 21, he has shown
natural talent, and I believe he will go far
|
| 20:21 | in photojournalism.
|
| 20:23 | Unfortunately, I will be losing Richard
to San Francisco State University, where
|
| 20:28 | he will further his career.
|
| 20:30 | Upon his graduation, I hope to rehire him."
|
| 20:33 | I have no idea why he wrote
this letter, or what this is for.
|
| 20:37 | But I got to San Francisco State, and I
think I was still a bit fresh, kind of
|
| 20:44 | out of the seminary, kind of
free, and I was in San Francisco.
|
| 20:48 | And a friend and I just sat down and
had coffee, and I don't know what got into
|
| 20:54 | us, but we decided then and there,
before the semester even started, we'd paid
|
| 20:59 | for our books, our tuition, our housing.
|
| 21:01 | All of those two years I worked at
the Star Free Press to get myself to San
|
| 21:04 | Francisco State, to continue my
education in photography, and I threw it all away.
|
| 21:10 | We said, "We are leaving.
We are going to go.
|
| 21:11 | We are going to leave. Forget school."
|
| 21:13 | We turned our books back, our housing
money back, everything we got, like 80%
|
| 21:18 | of the money back.
|
| 21:19 | And we bought one-way tickets, one-way
tickets to Mexico City, and we landed in Mexico.
|
| 21:26 | I can't even tell you why.
|
| 21:27 | We just we wanted to go take pictures.
|
| 21:30 | I wanted to just walk the earth with my
camera, and it was very naive and very
|
| 21:36 | immature of me, but that's what I wanted to do.
|
| 21:39 | At that point of my life, that's
what I just felt I wanted to do.
|
| 21:41 | And I had a friend who
wanted to do that with me too.
|
| 21:44 | So we landed in Mexico City, and we
flipped a coin, whether we were going to go
|
| 21:51 | north or we were going to go south.
|
| 21:53 | And it came up tails, and it
was south, and we headed south.
|
| 21:57 | We got on a train, and we took a
journey that took us months and months of--all
|
| 22:04 | the way through Mexico and all
the way through Central America.
|
| 22:07 | We turned around and came back.
|
| 22:10 | Mexico and the Central America trip
was so different, yet there was something
|
| 22:18 | that coincided that made it so familiar.
|
| 22:22 | I happened to be in Central America,
in Guatemala specifically, during Easter
|
| 22:30 | Holy Week, which as a
Catholic I knew everything about.
|
| 22:34 | I had just left that life.
|
| 22:36 | I don't know.
|
| 22:39 | There is so much of me in this
picture when I look back now.
|
| 22:42 | I mean this is a picture that I would
have never thought I could pull off at
|
| 22:47 | the Star Free Press.
|
| 22:48 | And somehow, being in another country,
in another frame of mind--it's dark,
|
| 22:54 | it's gloomy, it's mysterious, you
don't quite know what's going on, it's
|
| 23:00 | spiritual, it's ambiguous.
|
| 23:03 | Those are all of the things that are,
as I've matured as a photographer, are
|
| 23:09 | part of what I'm going for.
|
| 23:12 | They are part of my style,
what I bring to my work.
|
| 23:15 | And it's very powerful for me to sit
down now and look at pictures I took at the
|
| 23:21 | very beginning of my career, and see that there.
|
| 23:30 | The ingredient that came into the mix
that really helped me was a little bit of
|
| 23:37 | studying of the people that came before me.
|
| 23:40 | When I was 12, I never
thought to look more at Ansel Adams.
|
| 23:45 | I never thought to look more.
|
| 23:46 | I never thought that there were
people who had taken pictures before me.
|
| 23:50 | I was the first person on earth to
discover this and fall in love with
|
| 23:54 | this whole idea.
|
| 23:57 | So I began to study people.
|
| 23:59 | I began to know who W. Eugene Smith
was and who Robert Frank was and Leonard
|
| 24:04 | Freed, and all of these people who I
began to kind of admire and try and
|
| 24:09 | emulate, or learn from in some sense.
|
| 24:12 | And I think that that's what I was
doing here, looking at pictures and
|
| 24:16 | composition, and reading a little bit
about Walker Evans changed my life--that
|
| 24:23 | he would shoot surreptitiously on the subway.
|
| 24:26 | And I thought, every time I pull up the
camera to somebody's face in Mexico, or
|
| 24:31 | Central America, they all want to look at me.
|
| 24:32 | They all want to stop doing what they
are doing, but what if you just did this
|
| 24:36 | little surreptitious thing.
|
| 24:37 | This idea of street photography, and I
was in a place where the streets are the
|
| 24:42 | most vibrant thing in the world.
|
| 24:45 | And here I was, there.
|
| 24:47 | I mean, I remember this picture is
directly after I learned about what Walker
|
| 24:55 | Evans did, and the idea of shooting
from the hip, and how you could do that.
|
| 25:00 | What possessed--I almost
wouldn't even take this picture now.
|
| 25:02 | I mean these guys look
like they would kick my butt.
|
| 25:04 | I mean these are mechanics.
|
| 25:06 | They are all greasy.
|
| 25:07 | Two of them look like practically
children, and this guy looks like a tank.
|
| 25:11 | I mean why I felt I had the right to go
up to these guys in another country and
|
| 25:18 | shoot pictures of them, I don't know.
|
| 25:20 | But I did, I did it surreptitiously.
|
| 25:22 | And I just shot a few from the hip.
|
| 25:24 | I got this picture and a
series of other pictures.
|
| 25:27 | I eventually brought it up
to my face, and I remember.
|
| 25:29 | I will look at this proof sheet.
|
| 25:30 | You can tell when I brought it up to my
face, because they all moved, and there
|
| 25:33 | was not this body language.
|
| 25:35 | So for me it was a nice convergence
of studying the greats and learning
|
| 25:40 | about the greats, and realizing that
I wanted to shoot with more intent and
|
| 25:45 | more intention.
|
| 25:53 | Coming to San Francisco,
especially the Mission District, was an amazing
|
| 25:58 | experience for me after living my life
in Southern California in a little town.
|
| 26:08 | But I had just come from Latin America,
so it was foreign, but at the same
|
| 26:11 | time it was familiar.
|
| 26:15 | But the Mission District especially is amazing.
|
| 26:18 | There is nothing like it.
|
| 26:23 | I mean, the most amazing thing about
being in this neighborhood, especially just
|
| 26:27 | walking in the Mission, is the idea of,
there is like little stuff everywhere.
|
| 26:33 | This is such a visually
rich community and place.
|
| 26:38 | I just love it.
|
| 26:39 | It really feeds into my need to capture it all.
|
| 26:48 | Oh, this is great. I love this. Hold on.
|
| 26:56 | You wait long enough and somebody
passes through your frame, which is great.
|
| 27:02 | It's really just an
impulse about what appeals to me.
|
| 27:05 | There is so much here.
|
| 27:06 | It could be anything, but I
just kind of go with my gut.
|
| 27:12 | We all have that inclination when we
have a camera to take a picture, and all I
|
| 27:17 | did was learn the idea not to resist that.
|
| 27:20 | Every time my finger wants to press
the trigger for whatever reason, I
|
| 27:24 | don't question it.
|
| 27:25 | I just do it.
|
| 27:26 | Oh, it's great!
|
| 27:38 | Traveling in Latin America was
really what started my passion for street
|
| 27:44 | photography, for this, for like
what I kind of call "the hunt."
|
| 27:52 | And to be able to come here and do
it and feel it is amazing, but that's
|
| 28:00 | certainly where it started.
|
| 28:02 | Hunt, hunt, hunting, right?
|
| 28:04 | Like HUNT'S Quality.
|
| 28:05 | How many times does that happen?
|
| 28:09 | To me street photography is about
instinct, reacting quickly, not having to
|
| 28:15 | think about a lot of factors.
|
| 28:18 | This little camera, this basically
little point-and-shoot does that for me.
|
| 28:24 |
|
| 28:29 | The other thing that's important for me,
like I just took a picture there, and I
|
| 28:33 | really feel like I have possibly
captured that person in a real situation.
|
| 28:38 | I think had I brought the camera up to
my face and taken some time to do some
|
| 28:42 | things, she would have not been as natural.
|
| 28:47 | I am ridiculously, stupidly
passionate about taking pictures.
|
| 28:58 | It's really liberating for me.
|
| 29:01 | Oh, this is nice.
|
| 29:13 | Right, I mean that is a sweet little
moment, two people waiting for the bus
|
| 29:17 | up against the wall.
|
| 29:19 | They are just--I don't know I love that.
|
| 29:21 | I love that.
|
| 29:24 | This is just the art of discovery, right.
|
| 29:27 | That's all good storytelling really is in anyway: making a reader
or a viewer feel like they've discovered something for the first
|
| 29:35 | time the way I discovered it.
|
| 29:38 | It's just, it's little tiny
silly things, like maybe that.
|
| 29:49 | (Music playing.)
|
| 30:08 | My time at the San Jose Mercury News
started as an intern.
|
| 30:15 | After my internship was up, the
timing was right, and they had a
|
| 30:18 | full-time temporary position.
|
| 30:20 | And I was like, I am on it. This is perfect.
|
| 30:22 | I'll stay.
|
| 30:26 | There was something going on around me
that interested me and fortunately didn't
|
| 30:31 | really interest any of the other photographers.
|
| 30:35 | I was beginning to get these
kind of business assignments.
|
| 30:38 | And on the face of them,
they weren't very glamorous.
|
| 30:40 | They weren't very exciting,
and oftentimes I found myself laughing at
|
| 30:45 | this assignment.
|
| 30:46 | What's the name of this company?
|
| 30:47 | I can't even pronounce it.
|
| 30:48 | Google or whatever it was, and we
would go, and it would be nothing.
|
| 30:52 | This was the thought of Google in a
very small, a very small office they could
|
| 30:58 | fit all of their employees in.
|
| 31:01 | And to photograph that and come
back, and it was an assignment.
|
| 31:04 | No big deal.
|
| 31:05 | We did it. We put it in the Merc.
We moved onto the next one.
|
| 31:07 | You walk into a little silly place called Yahoo!
|
| 31:11 | and people were sleeping under
desks in sleeping bags or whatever.
|
| 31:15 | They weren't on the radar, but their
exposure in the Merc and everything they
|
| 31:20 | were doing--the valley was just changing.
|
| 31:23 | And it was fun to be there at the time.
|
| 31:26 | And I got to once walk into Google
where it was a handful of people and then go
|
| 31:32 | back to this ultimate campus that
sprawled several cities, more or less.
|
| 31:37 | It was a really, really amazing experience.
|
| 31:43 | Nothing is ever just one person.
|
| 31:47 | So I had somebody at the
Mercury News, his name was Dai Sugano.
|
| 31:52 | And Dai came and worked with the
Mercury News right about the same time all of
|
| 31:57 | these wonderful things were happening in
the valley, and I was covering the boom
|
| 32:00 | and had all this energy, and we just
started talking about, what could we do?
|
| 32:07 | What could we learn.
|
| 32:08 | How could we kind of up our game,
and try new storytelling and all these kind of things.
|
| 32:12 | And it was at that point that we kind
of conceived this idea of kind of making
|
| 32:17 | our own kind of school, learning on our own.
|
| 32:20 | Well, let's just teach ourselves these things.
|
| 32:22 | We'll just stay after work,
and we'll just---we'll learn Dreamweaver, and
|
| 32:25 | we'll learn Flash.
|
| 32:26 | We'll learn all the technologies
that could possibly help us tell stories
|
| 32:30 | better, and let's just do it.
|
| 32:31 | And then at the end of it, it was
like, now what do we do with all of this stuff?
|
| 32:34 | We know this stuff.
|
| 32:35 | We taught ourselves this
stuff, but now what do we do?
|
| 32:38 | For us, it was about creating a
showcase for not only ourselves, but for the
|
| 32:47 | photographic staff of the Mercury
News, to showcase their stories and our
|
| 32:52 | stories that we were telling that were
in print but weren't being served well in print.
|
| 32:58 | At that time, the newspaper, the
pages in newspapers were shrinking.
|
| 33:04 | There wasn't enough room in the
paper for three or four good pictures;
|
| 33:09 | there was just one picture.
|
| 33:10 | And people were telling amazing stories.
|
| 33:12 | So the web was this wonderful thing.
|
| 33:14 | It had infinite amount of space.
|
| 33:15 | We could put infinite
amount of pictures and audio.
|
| 33:18 | So we did.
|
| 33:19 | What we did, what myself--and when I
say we, and I say it all the time, because
|
| 33:24 | we really are that team;
|
| 33:26 | it's probably closer to Laurel and
Hardy than like any other Hewlett &
|
| 33:29 | Packard--but we created what was
MercuryNewsPhoto.com, which it wasn't an easy
|
| 33:34 | thing to do build, and it wasn't an easy
thing to sell to, at that time, the San
|
| 33:38 | Jose Mercury News as a
viable way to present content.
|
| 33:41 | (Inaudible speech.)
|
| 33:52 | (Female Speaker 4: I wanted to take my kids
to New York. I didn't want them to be on a plane.)
|
| 33:55 | (Female Speaker 4: And for all they knew,
they could be in Santa Rosa, you know.)
|
| 33:57 | (Female Speaker 5: For 500 years, scores of
India's widows have been flocking to holy places like
|
| 34:02 | (Female Speaker 5: this one, Vrindivan,
the so-called City of Widows.)
|
| 34:07 | (Female Speaker 5: Upon a husband's death, many widows find themselves--)
(Female Speaker 6: Critical Mass.
|
| 34:09 | (Female Speaker 6: It's the best, like,
movement of solidarity within bicyclists.
|
| 34:15 | (Female Speaker 6: It's awesome. You get
to see all your friends that rides bikes.)
|
| 34:17 | (Female Speaker 6: And you get to claim the streets for once.
Because usually we're not, we're not in charge on the streets.)
|
| 34:24 | Mercury News Photo became a great
place for our photographers to tell stories
|
| 34:30 | that had breath and could breathe,
and you could tell them longer, and you can
|
| 34:35 | get into them deeper, and you could
show more pictures, and you could hear the
|
| 34:40 | voices of the people whose
stories you were trying to tell.
|
| 34:44 | The power of storytelling in that
form was really, really, really, really a
|
| 34:51 | powerful, a powerful thing.
|
| 34:55 | Dai Sugano found a story from the
newspaper, a daily story, where we had gone
|
| 35:01 | out and shot one picture from this story.
|
| 35:04 | It was about a mobile
home park that was closing.
|
| 35:06 | And it was just one picture and a story.
|
| 35:08 | Powerful story, powerful picture.
|
| 35:10 | And he said, "There is something more here.
|
| 35:13 | I want to do something more.
|
| 35:14 | There is more of a story here."
|
| 35:17 | We launched a project which is called
Uprooted about this mobile home closing
|
| 35:23 | down and the story of the people, not
only how it affected them on a daily basis
|
| 35:29 | but how it affected them
kind of in the long term.
|
| 35:32 | We were able to do that because we had
more time to spend with them, and we also
|
| 35:36 | had--we knew we had a home for this story.
|
| 35:40 | (Video playing.)
|
| 35:43 | (Video playing.)
(Music playing.)
|
| 35:54 | At this time there is video.
|
| 35:57 | Still some video.
|
| 35:59 | There is some music.
|
| 36:02 | All of these things were--
(Female Speaker 7: This would've been my home for 26 years.
|
| 36:08 | (Female Speaker 7: And I anticipate to live in here til I die.)
|
| 36:11 | That, to me, that is powerful, to be
able to hear this woman's voice as part of
|
| 36:17 | this story being told through
audio, video, stills, all together.
|
| 36:22 | We are here in the first one minute,
and we are kind of trying to use, to the
|
| 36:27 | best of our ability, all
of these things together.
|
| 36:30 | (Female Speaker 5: When we moved into this mobile
home we thought we were going to stay here until the kids--)
|
| 36:38 | We are jumping around in time.
|
| 36:40 | We are doing a lot of things that I mean,
traditional cinema has been doing it
|
| 36:43 | for a long time, but not
photojournalism and not particularly traditional news.
|
| 36:52 | There is no narrator.
|
| 36:53 | There is no "we're at the
home of so-and-so and so-and-so."
|
| 36:57 | We wanted to see if we could let the
story and the people tell their story,
|
| 37:05 | which is really what we were going for.
|
| 37:10 | I mean, it's a saga.
|
| 37:11 | I mean, learning to cut to
particular pieces of music.
|
| 37:17 | Why I am excited?
|
| 37:18 | We didn't go in our film school for
this, we didn't read a book on this;
|
| 37:23 | we were figuring this out for
ourselves because we wanted to.
|
| 37:25 | (Matt Frei: The nominees for new
approaches to news and documentary programming
|
| 37:29 | documentaries are as follows.)
|
| 37:31 | (Male Speaker 2: The ethnic balance of Russia--)
(Male Speaker 3: From Russian with Hate, A Vanguard Special Report.)
|
| 37:37 | (Male Speaker 4: I never support the immigrants.)
|
| 37:39 | (Male Speaker 5: A year ago in Afghanistan.)
(Male Speaker 3: Afghanistan: The Other War. FRONTLINT/World.)
|
| 37:44 | (Male Speaker 6: Prongs are on the host.
That's where we were shooting from yesterday.)
|
| 37:47 | (Female Speaker 7: This has been my home for 26 years, and I)
(Male Speaker 3: Uprooted, Mercurynews.com, the San Jose Mercury News.)
|
| 37:54 | (Female Speaker 7: I anticipate to live in here 'til I die.)
|
| 37:57 | (Matt: So, the winner, that's what
we're interested in. Mercurynews.com Uprooted!)
|
| 38:03 | (Applause.)
|
| 38:08 | (Dai Sugano: Thank you very much.)
|
| 38:16 | (Applause.)
|
| 38:24 | (Dai: Thank you. I just want to thank--)
|
| 38:28 | (Laughter.)
|
| 38:32 | (Dai: I just want to thank my Director of
Photography, Geri Migielicz, and colleague)
|
| 38:38 | (Dai: and good friend, Richard Koci Hernandez,
and reporter Julie Patel who worked on this project with me.)
|
| 38:47 | I used to think actors get up and they
go, "I am just honored to be nominated."
|
| 38:50 | And you are like yeah, yeah!
You really want to win.
|
| 38:52 | It's like no, no when you're nominated,
and you are nominated next to Frontline
|
| 38:56 | and PBS and CNN, and you're nominated
within the News category of the Emmys,
|
| 39:03 | News and Documentary, it's flattering,
and it is wonderful just to be honored.
|
| 39:10 | And we went there, and we thought, "Come on.
|
| 39:11 | We are competing against a PBS
Frontline documentary with a name like 'From
|
| 39:17 | Russia with Hate' and a wonderful piece
by--about the Marlboro Marine, about a
|
| 39:23 | marine in Afghanistan and all of these
heavy-duty things and here we are, that
|
| 39:28 | little engine that could, the little
story about some people who were evicted
|
| 39:32 | from a trailer park in Sunnyvale, California."
|
| 39:36 | We were really obsessed with,
how could we tell stories better?
|
| 39:39 | It really was. We wanted to tell stories better.
|
| 39:41 | And all of a sudden, the Internet
gave us the opportunity to tell them with
|
| 39:45 | audio and tell them with video and do
all--and that's all we wanted to do.
|
| 39:47 | And we wanted to have a place, a home
that we built, right, that we built, and
|
| 39:52 | we said, "Here are the stories.
|
| 39:53 | Let's put the stories there.
|
| 39:54 | The world can see them."
|
| 39:56 | And then we wanted to maybe be a very
small part of an example to the industry
|
| 40:01 | in all those other photo departments
and storytellers out there to go, yeah, we
|
| 40:05 | can have a home here, and we can tell
our stories in this way, and maybe that
|
| 40:09 | this is the way you can do it.
|
| 40:19 | After Uprooted, one of the
exciting things that really happened was not only
|
| 40:24 | this idea of how
storytelling could change for us;
|
| 40:27 | technology changed.
|
| 40:29 | I mean really, the web changed.
|
| 40:31 | It really emerged.
|
| 40:32 | Laptops got smaller, cheaper.
|
| 40:34 | Cameras, we were able to do things
with technology that we weren't able to do before.
|
| 40:39 | For me, this time while newspapers
were suffering, to me, was, and we still
|
| 40:44 | continue to be in, like this golden
age of storytelling, and for us it was
|
| 40:47 | the beginning. It's right there.
|
| 40:49 | Uprooted moved right from that point.
|
| 40:51 | Then we took technology that we were
able to own and buy ourselves and sit in a
|
| 40:57 | cafe, sit outside,
and produce something on a laptop.
|
| 41:01 | Where before this time
you really couldn't do it.
|
| 41:03 | The point of entry was thousands and
thousands of dollars and all this kind
|
| 41:06 | of equipment.
|
| 41:07 | But now I could sit on this laptop,
connected to the Internet, decide I wanted
|
| 41:12 | to learn After Effects, and I have
a question, boom, somebody answered.
|
| 41:16 | That was very, very powerful for me.
|
| 41:17 | There are people out there who
have no idea that they're part of any
|
| 41:21 | success that I've had.
|
| 41:22 | Any success I've had is not just me.
|
| 41:24 | It's some guy in the Netherlands at 2 am,
or some woman in L.A. who decided to
|
| 41:30 | answer my question and help my story
get this much better because I wanted to
|
| 41:34 | learn that technique.
|
| 41:36 | MultimediaShooter, the blog
that I created, was a no-brainer.
|
| 41:39 | It's my passion. I love it.
|
| 41:41 | I love the idea of giving back.
|
| 41:43 | I love the idea of thinking that
maybe there is a storyteller out there
|
| 41:46 | somewhere where I was who needs to
know one thing about something they don't
|
| 41:51 | know, and maybe they'll find it on my blog.
|
| 41:54 | I love to do tutorials on the blog.
|
| 41:56 | I love to do whatever I can to give.
|
| 41:59 | It's really kind of a simple thing.
|
| 42:01 | It's a give-back.
|
| 42:02 | I am going to start right here with the
latest post on my blog, which is why you
|
| 42:10 | need to learn After Effects now.
|
| 42:13 | It's just a thought. It's just something that
I'm putting out there for people to ponder, think about.
|
| 42:19 | But what I really do love is, as I go
through this, I'll curate, I'll say, hey!
|
| 42:23 | Look at this kind of storytelling.
|
| 42:24 | Look at what After Effects and motion
graphics are doing to storytelling, how
|
| 42:28 | they are elevating storytelling.
|
| 42:30 | Look at these videos that I saw.
|
| 42:32 | Take a look at them. Then hey!
|
| 42:34 | Here's where you can go learn it.
|
| 42:35 | And I put that stuff out there.
|
| 42:37 | And then what's really valuable to me is
you get in conversations like--that are
|
| 42:41 | on the blog right now.
|
| 42:43 | Here is a student always looking for
new ways to make videos more memorable.
|
| 42:46 | I was definitely inspired.
|
| 42:48 | I love--and now all of a sudden there
is this conversation between whoever this
|
| 42:52 | person is, wherever they are,
about a new way of storytelling.
|
| 42:56 | Right at the beginning,
right when you see it, it's boom!
|
| 43:00 | It's text. It's text moving and flowing.
|
| 43:03 | Imagine your friend being tortured,
killed, sexually assaulted, daughter, son,
|
| 43:09 | killed, boom, for their beliefs, ideas.
|
| 43:14 | All of these things are something that
motion graphics and After Effects bring
|
| 43:20 | to this story--not a
narrator, not a voice of God.
|
| 43:23 | I was fortunate enough to be involved
with a project that wanted to look back at
|
| 43:31 | what had happened with the student
protest after the elections in Iran.
|
| 43:36 | And the story wasn't an immediate story.
|
| 43:40 | I couldn't go there.
|
| 43:41 | The story had already happened.
|
| 43:43 | I had all of these assets, but I wanted
to create and be true to the power and
|
| 43:50 | truth of what happened there.
|
| 43:52 | And at that point, it was a wonderful
convergence of knowing a tool now that I
|
| 43:57 | taught myself and putting it into
practice, and that kind of culminated into
|
| 44:01 | this story that we called Interrupted Lives.
|
| 44:04 | (Music playing.)
|
| 44:28 | People are doing the most amazing
creative things, and it always makes me think
|
| 44:33 | like, have we been this
creative the whole time, I wonder.
|
| 44:37 | Has that person always been that
creative just sitting there on the other side
|
| 44:40 | of the world, and I'm only finding out about it?
|
| 44:42 | Or now, because of technology they
can be creative and be expressive.
|
| 44:46 | I don't know.
|
| 44:47 | It's a wonderful time to be a storyteller,
to be alive, to be--all the tools and
|
| 44:54 | access and potential that we have to
tell a story, and anybody in the world has
|
| 44:59 | the potential to see it.
|
| 45:01 | Have we ever been able to do that?
|
| 45:03 | I don't think so. I don't think you can argue
that a storyteller has had the potential to be
|
| 45:08 | that powerful.
|
| 45:09 | (Music playing.)
|
| 45:22 | Richard: I got hired here at UC Berkeley to
teach the things I taught myself, and so I
|
| 45:27 | am teaching new media.
|
| 45:30 | I am teaching video, multimedia
storytelling, Final Cut, photography, a little
|
| 45:36 | HTML, a little CSS, a little bit of everything.
|
| 45:41 | Teaching for me was never part of my
plan or part of my life path that I
|
| 45:46 | saw ahead of me.
|
| 45:48 | I thought I would be a
traditional storyteller all my life.
|
| 45:51 | I never thought I would stop and
teach, but I cannot tell you how much I
|
| 45:57 | love teaching.
|
| 45:58 | It's unbelievable.
|
| 46:02 | This is what I love.
|
| 46:03 | This is right when you walk into
the Graduate School of Journalism.
|
| 46:06 | What I love is a little bit of a mix
of the old-school printed papers from
|
| 46:11 | around the world and then a screen
actually of the sites that we are building here.
|
| 46:16 | Why I got hired was to build these
community sites, and teach the students all
|
| 46:20 | of this community journalism and
multimedia that you're seeing here.
|
| 46:23 | So this is the first thing you see when
you come into the school, which I love.
|
| 46:29 | The simple fact that somebody with my
experience would land at a place like UC
|
| 46:37 | Berkeley at a graduate-level
teaching position baffles me.
|
| 46:43 | Sometimes I wonder how I got here,
and why am I uniquely qualified to do this,
|
| 46:49 | because it's not a traditional position.
|
| 46:53 | People who traditionally teach at this
level have Masters and they have done all
|
| 46:57 | this academic work,
and I've just been in the trenches.
|
| 47:00 | But I learned that that's what they
wanted, and that's what brought me here.
|
| 47:06 | My experience at the Mercury News and
what I did by self-teaching myself all
|
| 47:10 | this technology and practicing that
technology is what they were looking for.
|
| 47:16 | The one thing I think that you have to
have now as go forward--and if you take
|
| 47:21 | this advice to heart and you really do
it, you will thank me at the end of two
|
| 47:25 | years-- you need to begin to brand yourself.
|
| 47:27 | You need to begin to think about who
you are as a journalist and begin to put
|
| 47:31 | yourself out on the web.
|
| 47:33 | I'll show you a little--
so how WordPress.com in minutes--last night I did it.
|
| 47:42 | It took me 30 seconds to
give my dog a WordPress blog.
|
| 47:45 | 30 seconds, okay.
|
| 47:47 | Create a small demo reel, a minute
and a half, create a Vimeo page, put it on there.
|
| 47:52 | If you have a business
card, point people to that.
|
| 47:57 | Everybody talks about that whole thing: if you can't do,
you teach--which has got to be baloney because I did it.
|
| 48:05 | I did a lot, and that's what I am doing now.
|
| 48:07 | I am teaching what I did, so I
did, and now I am teaching it.
|
| 48:12 | So if I can not tell them what to do,
but maybe show them how I did it or show
|
| 48:17 | them a way that someone else did it,
maybe that's a good way of teaching.
|
| 48:22 | I am talking about something we don't
teach here that's very foreign to us.
|
| 48:27 | It's called promoting yourself.
|
| 48:29 | It's called branding yourself.
|
| 48:32 | Style has no formula, but it has a secret key.
|
| 48:34 | It's the extension of your personality.
|
| 48:37 | I say this too because it's not
something you hear in journalism.
|
| 48:40 | We're not supposed to have personality.
We're supposed to be these robots.
|
| 48:44 | I am just here for the facts;
|
| 48:45 | I have no opinion.
|
| 48:47 | I mean, but think about it.
|
| 48:48 | You want to have a visual style that's
your own that you are recognized for that
|
| 48:52 | takes you above everyone else.
|
| 48:55 | How in the hell do you get that style?
|
| 48:57 | I have no idea, but I thought about something.
|
| 49:00 | Here is what I, what I get,
dark, black and white.
|
| 49:04 | There is religious.
|
| 49:06 | There is some greediness.
|
| 49:07 | I scratched, eventually scratched
the negative up and hand-colored it.
|
| 49:10 | There is this kind of texture to it.
|
| 49:12 | It's been there since the beginning.
|
| 49:14 | Before I got employed, here's me at
the Mercury News doing daily assignments
|
| 49:19 | on a train station.
|
| 49:20 | Look at that picture.
|
| 49:21 | Dark, blurry, can't identify people.
|
| 49:25 | You start making connections,
who you are, and blah, blah, blah.
|
| 49:28 | You send me to cover the
unveiling of a new Apple screen.
|
| 49:32 | What do I come back with? Not a picture of the screen,
but a picture of some blurry guy walking past the
|
| 49:36 | Apple thing with the screen right here.
|
| 49:40 | Don't be afraid of it. I was afraid of it.
|
| 49:42 | It looks like, oh, you are a one-trick pony.
|
| 49:44 | You won't be a one-trick pony.
|
| 49:46 | This is who you are. This is what you do.
|
| 49:48 | People I think respect that and want
that, so we go from that philosophy,
|
| 49:52 | style, blah, blah, blah.
|
| 49:54 | The students here frighten me.
|
| 49:56 | They frighten me to keep working, to
keep telling stories, because if I stop or
|
| 50:01 | blink for one second, they are going
to catch up to me, and the student is
|
| 50:04 | going to be the master.
|
| 50:05 | A student will be the teacher.
|
| 50:08 | I mean, I just finished a two-hour class,
and I learned two things I didn't know
|
| 50:12 | before that class started from
students because we sat down afterwards and
|
| 50:17 | looked at something,
and they asked me a question.
|
| 50:19 | I said, "Well, you know I don't," and
they are like, "Oh, well, this is how you do it."
|
| 50:22 | That's what's most exciting is that now
-- they don't really know this--but I
|
| 50:26 | feel like I am a student.
|
| 50:28 | I didn't get my graduate degree, but I
feel like I am getting it now, and at
|
| 50:34 | the same time I'm teaching, so it's a weird thing,
but it's a wonderful thing at the same time.
|
| 50:39 | (Music playing.)
|
| 50:53 | (Music playing.)
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