For Two Filmmakers, California Is a Place You Havent Really Seen Before

In the summer of 2009, with signs of the Great Recession scattered across much of California, filmmaker Drea Cooper and photographer Zackary Canepari decided it was time to work together full time to document what they were witnessing around them. Zack and I have always been very interested in following stories off the beaten path, says Cooper, who met Canepari in 2003 when they were both working as production assistants on a commercial. Canepari had just moved back to the Bay Area from India, where he was a freelance photojournalist for three years, when the pair began a project they would later call California Is a Place, an online series of selffunded, documentarystyle shortfilms about the Golden State.