Honey Pies and Aquadettes

An essay review of California Is a Place, a collection of three- to ten-minute web video vignettes, by filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari. Their work has attracted more than three million viewers since their first videos went online in early 2010. Widely distributed across the Internet, the videos have won awards and been featured on news sites including PBS’s NewsHour, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times. “People are craving honest stories,” Cooper says. “They want stories that are unmitigated by the television structure of dramatic moments.”