Member Profile: Elissa Mintz Written by Lisa Smith

Throughout the summer Elissa Mintz has been busy honing her video skills at SCAT. Her intention is to become proficient in video making. She first came to SCAT as an intern nine years ago to learn video, while working full time at a high tech job. “The demands of my job made it hard for me focus on the internship. So I had to stop, but the thought of SCAT and making video was still on my mind.”

She eventually left her high tech job and was working part-time at a non-profit in Cambridge. She was going to leave her job to learn video when her boss told her she could make a video about the organization as part of her job. In the fall of 2003, she found herself back at SCAT to learn the ABC’s of video production. Her first project was an informational video about the organization.

After her certification tape she produced A Constant State of Surprise: Miracles in Everyday Life. “It was fun!” Elissa said, “The hard part was finding people who had experienced a miracle. I got people I know to be in it, such as my mailman and neighbor.”

Finding the courage to ask people to be in a video can be difficult for a new producer. Elissa overcame her initial shyness and found most people were delighted to be interviewed. She lights up as she says, “I wanted to make the story a little more interesting than talking head shots and break it up with photographs. My interviewees were so helpful! Not only did they agree to be interviewed, they even gave me pictures of themselves to use in the video.”

Her most recent project was to edit the footage fellow SCAT members shot during The ArtBeat Festival. When asked how she felt when she decided to take on the task of editing other people’s video footage she said, “I was scared! Because it was going to be my first time editing with Final-Cut, it was a longer project than my other projects and I felt responsible to make something great because I was working with other people’s video.”

As it turned out she had a great time editing the project and is very happy with the results. She recounts, “It was totally fun. While I was editing I would think five minutes had passed by and then I would realize an hour had passed! I also found that editing is an organic process. Ideas would come to me from looking at the footage. I started to match shots in the opening sequence. There was a shot of bikes and bikers falling to the ground and I matched them to dancers falling to the floor in the next shot. With this project I made a quantum leap in editing and in my confidence too.”

Asked to give recommendations to a new producer Elissa says, “Go out and shoot a few times and experiment. Tell yourself that you will make a few mistakes, but it’s okay. You will get used to the technical issues in production quickly. I did. Faster than I thought.”

Elissa plans to make a living in video production. Wistfully she said, “A part of me is sad to produce outside of SCAT, because of the freedom I have here. Hopefully, I will bring the feelings I have here, to be free to create, to the next phase in my video career.”

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