Emile: SALT Institute

Emile, SALT@1998

In the summer of 1998, I was working on learning HTML and audio editing with a man named Kip. He was the sound editor for the movie, Message in a Bottle, with Kevin Kostner. He was working on the film set, while he was also teaching us, students at SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, in Portland, Maine. 

My teacher, Pam, faculty at SALT, and she was loaning her house for the film set. The film leads us to believe that the location of the harbor is in North Carolina, but Pam, Kip, and I know that the harbor was in Portland, Maine. 

Anyway, so I was practicing sound editing with Kip, and I created sound bites for my newly coded website with HTML. I had recorded my "subject" Emile at his small retail shop in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. I was working on doing a documentary of him, as he had recently lost his wife, and he was grieving. 

My project about Emile Ohayon, was featured on the front of the website. I was so proud. We worked as a team to create the first digital issue of SALT Magazine, since years prior it was only in paper form. I worked with very talented teachers from National Geographic and Boston Globe. 

Many hours of transcribing tapes, coding a new language for me: HTML, and editing my photos on Photoshop, I finally created "Emile" and expressed his grief about his loss of his wife.