"Before this course, I couldn't imagine producing a project on my own. I walked out believing that I could. Thank you."

As someone who lives among U.S. troops as an embedded photographer for The Associated Press in Iraq, I like to think I'm no stranger to discipline. But nothing could have prepared me for the rigors of the Platypus Workshop.

Surrender your egos. That was all Dirck Halstead and PF Bentley asked of us on the first night of the Platypus Workshop in Rockport, Maine.

While Hillary and Obama were fighting it out for the crucial Texas vote, The Platypus Workshops charged across The Lone Star state and into Louisiana in February, as it conducted back-to-back workshops teaching video to photojournalists who came from as far away as New Zealand.

What's a platypus? By definition, it's an Australian aquatic egg-laying mammal, having a soft pliable bill shaped like a duck's, webbed feet, and sleek grey fur – at least that is what I told my co-workers at the Palm Beach Post when I signed up for a Platypus Workshop.

I was becoming a video junkie...Suddenly, my day job--a still-photography veteran photojournalist--seemed to come up quite a bit short in comparison to some of the new-wave storytelling techniques I was seeing on the Internet.

At the end of the two-week course you'll have a 3- to 5-minute story that will probably surprise you. Mine sure surprised me.

When I was first asked to help produce television to go with one of my newspaper stories, I was outraged.

Just as I was getting prepared to go off to the Democratic Convention in Boston, I got last-minute e-mail from David Lyman, the director of the Maine Photo Workshop. He had a last-minute cancellation from an instructor who was going to teach a two-week Digital Video course, and he wanted to know if I could fill in."

My first event was the Pug Halloween Party and that's when I realized that "Pug People" were a unique group.

I now observe life not only in moments, but also in sequences.

I started photographing blues musicians years ago while on assignment for the National Geographic Traveler magazine."

The film tells a personal story of what it was like to be an "embed" and presents a war you didn't see on TV."