Dell and Napa Valley Film Festival (NVFF) are proud to announce “The Crush” as the winning documentary short in the Dell Precision Docu-Challenge that took place at the 2014 Napa Valley Film Festival last week. The interactive film editing competition challenged up-and-coming documentary filmmakers to collaborate on the production of brief documentary shorts bringing to life the local community impact caused by the earthquake that struck Napa Valley in August.
Challenge participants were attending Napa Valley Film Festival as part of its unique Artist-in-Residence program hosted by Meadowood Napa Valley and all had documentary features screening at this year’s festival. They were divided into three teams and given a five hour time limit to produce a compelling 2-3 minute story on the recent earthquake from hours of pre-shot raw footage.
Footage was captured by local filmmaker Steven Bailey in advance of the festival and included a dozen interviews with Napa Valley business owners and b-roll video of the local surroundings, as well as photo and video content contributed to the Docu-Challenge by locals who experienced the earthquake first-hand. Each filmmaking team was given the exact same footage and all editing was done onsite at Meadowood Napa Valley using Adobe Premiere Pro software on Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstations paired with Dell UltraSharp Ultra HD 4K monitors.
“In a growing environment of increased competition and higher audience expectations, film and other digital content creation professionals are pressured to produce more break-through output in less time than ever before,” said Andy Rhodes, global executive director for Dell Precision workstations. “At Dell, we want to ensure that technology does not get in the way of the creative process but instead speeds it up and enhances it. Dell Precision workstations provide the industry-leading performance, expandability and reliability that filmmakers need to bring their creative ideas to the big screen, enabling them to deliver inspiring results, such as the short films produced during this challenge, faster than ever.”
Judges for the Dell Precision Docu-Challenge included Academy-Award winning documentary film director Morgan Neville and USA Today’s San Francisco Bureau Chief Jon Swartz, who evaluated each team’s completed project based on criteria including storytelling ability, effectiveness of the editing, innovation and originality, and overall impact of the piece.
“It was great to see what the filmmakers could do under such pressure,” said Morgan Neville, director of Twenty Feet from Stardom. “The diversity of views between the three different pieces was fantastic, and it was great impressive work all around.”
Taking a different approach then the other two filmmaking teams, the winning team chose to tell the story of the Napa earthquake aftermath from the perspective of Napa field workers with their documentary short, “The Crush”, which focused on the harvest and moving forward despite the devastation.
“The forgotten faces of the Napa earthquake were made front and center in ‘The Crush’,” said Jon Swartz of USA Today. “Their often-ignored story really drew me in as wine field workers are the invisible heart and soul of the industry.”
The winning documentary short was announced Sunday evening at the Napa Valley Film Festival Awards Ceremony at City Winery in Napa, and Dell awarded each member of the winning team with a Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation fully loaded with Adobe Premiere Pro CC for video editing. Members of the winning team included documentary filmmakers Sheila Canavan (Compared to What: The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank), Helen S. Cohen (States of Grace), Marcia Jarmel (Havana Curveball), and Tyler Measom (An Honest Liar).