Lauren Greenfield: Storyteller
Repurposing the Studio
She obtained EDLs and transferred the footage to her hard drives. Then, she says, “with Final Cut Pro and our big Cinema Displays, we repurposed my little photography studio as a film studio.”
She and her crew made the seven-minute multimedia piece that’s now on her website, as well as the extras for the DVD. “We were so inspired by the experience of cutting the film,” recounts Greenfield. “We saw we could do that in-house — even though we have much less firepower and money and experience than the world-class editor we hired on our generous HBO budget. And because we were working with Final Cut Pro, it was seamless. Best of all, I had more artistic control.”
Why Do We Live This Way?
Making “Thin” changed the way Greenfield works. “Final Cut Pro totally transformed our studio and opened up something for me creatively,” she says. “Now, cutting multimedia is part of our workflow. I’m adding interviews and ambient sound to my images, which is very exciting because sound has a magical — and natural — relationship with photography.”
What thrills Greenfield most, among all her “Thin” offshoots, is the forum on her website. “People are writing and telling me how eating disorder affects them, and we’re having this dialogue that’s an organic, live process.”
That’s sweet reward for Greenfield. “My pictures are always about creating questions,” she notes. “I’m asking, ‘Why do we live this way? Is this how we should live?’ My work is about questioning the values of the culture and creating awareness of how we are affected by the world we live in.”
Integration
Lauren Greenfield is all about integration. “My studio is 30 feet from my house with a catwalk between the two,” she says. “We have Macs or flat screen displays in almost every room, and they’re all connected. I can edit my pictures and access any application or project anywhere in the house or studio.”
Continues Greenfield, “The thing about Apple is that it becomes such a part of your lifestyle. For my family, it’s both work and play. The Apple platform drives my whole studio and our family entertainment system.”
She confesses to being a bit of a workaholic. “I don’t have time to learn new technologies. In fact, I hesitate to go into new technology if I feel like it will be this huge distraction. But we moved so seamlessly into using sound and video and having the web be the dynamic platform for my work, because the technology is Apple. Now we’re using iTunes and Aperture slide shows, and digitizing images and sound, and adding voices and video, and putting things together in Final Cut Pro.”
Passport to Courage
“The Apple technology actually inspires me to try new forms of expression,” says Greenfield. “Making ‘Thin’ was my crash course in filmmaking, and it was extremely gratifying. Now I have some expertise, and I can bring that back from the production company, where I had world-class partners like HBO, and do it myself.
“What got me really excited in high school and college and the reason I first picked up the camera is that it was a passport to get into other people’s lives — to go places I never would have gone. I was very shy, and it gave me a courage, a forwardness, I did not have. With the camera in hand, I had a reason to knock on someone’s door.”
