16 posts tagged “editing”

Finished up the last of the creator interviews today. Now, I need to step back, look at my downloaded footage, and my notes, and start to construct a structure for the film. Once I have a broad outline, I will go to the interviews I conducted with faculty and grad students from PSU's Urban Studies program to find relevant pieces of context to pull into the film. I also have about an hour's worth of tape from the 2008 Stumptown Comics Fest to review and download.

While I have noted places where the sound was not quite perfect due to static or mic bobbles, or where there were issues with settings for the image, on balance, principal photography went surprisingly well. No huge disasters on tape.

Another interview and supplemental footage reviewed; clips downloading now. First mic in the frame, but I should be able to crop it out pretty easily. A few bobbles, too. Realizing that I lost some momentum when I hit the gap a few weeks ago. This is important mostly because I am still in this phase of tedious work before getting to the creative side (again).

All of the tapes have now been logged and I have resumed reviewing and downloading. So far I am doing these tasks in quick succession instead of reviewing the remaining tape and then going back through to download clips. More mic bobbles; also looking at footage in a location where sound recording was a challenge due to environmental noise. I hope to be editing before the end of this month.

I am currently downloading the last set of clips from the tapes/interviews I have reviewed so far. The freedom of truly independent filmmaking is wonderful, but it does come with downsides in terms of resources, including time and labor. The good news is that once I do have all of the tapes logged and reviewed, and clips downloaded, I can work as an individual and make real progress on the film. When the final tapes are ready, it should not take much more than a week to finish this stage of the process.

No tapes to review the past few days, so I began to download clips from tapes I have already reviewed. In the past, I have tried to break clips up at a fine level, but here I find myself choosing longer excerpts. I think this is in part because I have become more adept at creating and using subclips in Final Cut. I have also had some experiences where I wish I had maintained the integrity of a particular interview, shot, or scene even though my intent was to use just a few seconds.

I am thinking about backups, too. I have a Time Machine drive formatted on-site, but want an off-site backup as well. Initially I thought that Jungle Disk would be one response, but the wireless connection on the Mac Pro is so wonky, I'm not sure I would ever be able to complete a transfer, or download the software. So, until I get that solved, I am thinking about a drive that I keep at the office most of the time.

Watched the first really good interview that I probably won't be using much of in the final film. There are a few subjects I spoke with who will end up not quite fitting into the big picture as well as others. I am considering ultimately releasing all, or at least a substantial chunk, of my raw footage online for others to view and play with. That's one way to ensure that the stuff on "the cutting room floor" doesn't end up simply forgotten and unused.

Noticed more mic bobbling, and seemingly more intrusive this time.

Having to defer some tapes as I wait for companion cassettes to be logged. I will likely be taking the next few days off from tape review. Generally, I am torn between wanting to power through the material and taking a more measured approach to ensure that my judgment stays clear. So far I have taken a measured approach looking at two to three interviews a day. With pauses for note taking, a thirty to forty minute interview has been taking about an hour to review.

Today, I encountered the first interview so far that is marred by one of the sound people moving the mic around; bip, bip, bip, bip. Fortunately, this isn't constant and I should be able to cut around the bobbles. I also hit one of the two tapes where the video mode had been shifted accidentally in the bag and went unnoticed until after several minutes had been recorded. At the time, I chose to play out the tape in the incorrect mode, but switched to the proper mode when a new tape was started. That may not have been the best choice. It might have been better to record the whole interview in the wrong mode and then conformed it all later. I won't really know what the effect of this choice will be until I get into editing proper. Finally, on the flaws and mistakes front, I learned that one of the people who worked on the tape logs managed to record over about two minutes of one of the interviews. I don't think I lost anything
valuable, but it was a shock. Am glad that this particular person did not get a chance to do work on the logs in an extensive way.

I've also noticed that my in-person perceptions of the interviews are not always born out on screen. I have found subjects that seemed kind of flat during recording coming across much better on playback. The differences are not dramatic, but enough to be encouraging. Less common is for a dyamic in-person interview to be turned flat in review. This is also encouraging, obviously.

One of the hardest things about this process is listening to my own voice on tape-after-tape.

I started reviewing my interview footage yesterday and I have a few early thoughts on what I've watched.

• Subjects who like to talk are good. You have listen to much more than you will need, but you're also more likely to get good material (I also have to say that some of the less relevant discussion I've heard in these first few tapes is as much a product of the questions I asked as it is a product of subject answers).
• More than before, even, I wish I had had a DP to work with. I undoubtedly would have done more set-ups with individual subjects, and would have ended up catching some little things that slipped by last summer, lack the reflections off of the glasses of one of my better interviews. Having written that, the video generally looks good. Rich, vibrant colors and clear images.
• Sound quality is excellent. Buying a field mixer before the shoot was obviously a good investment, as was the sound workshop I attended at the Northwest Film Center and this little tool.

I finished shooting tape for my planned submission to the Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF). The challenge here is to make a silent one minute video (or videos) that addresses a selected theme. The theme I've chosen to address is "Forgotten Places, Uncommon Spaces." The "forgotten place, uncommon space" that I've chosen is the ground, or what designer George Nelson calls "The City Floor." And, more specifically, I am making a video essay on the ways in which nature, primarily through erosion, plant, and insect life, "reclaims" urban asphalt and concrete. Nelson's suggestion that we take heed of The City Floor is a good one once you start to do it - the ground is full of interesting patterns, signs of life, and colors.

I spent part of this morning logging shots and plan on beginning editing at my campus office tomorrow. I am working with about 19 minutes of footage, and about 12-15 minutes of clips that I plan to initially capture in Final Cut. Selected videos will run on monitors in the Toronto subway during the Toronto International Film Festival.

As noted previously, the Willamette Valley Film Collective reconvened to take on the International Documentary Challenge once again. This year's experience was both easier and harder than 2006.

What made this challenge easier was largely having done it once already. Realizing that there is little that one can do until the clock starts ticking helped to focus our advance preparations. And, indeed, the shoot went pretty well - efficient, organized, people working well together. Our genre, "Art", and our chief subject, David Ensminger/the "Bop Apocalypse to Blitzkrieg Bop" exhibit at WOU's Hamersly Library, also helped to make this year's production run with more focus and purpose than last year's (as fun as the alpacas and their people were, it was difficult to structure our approach, and there was much more in the way of random videography that then had to be sorted through later. Trying to fit the topic into the "Sports" genre with the theme of "Freedom" didn't help either. "Art", "faith", and "punk" were a much nicer collective of concepts to work with).

However, I think that confidence about the shoot led to an overly lax approach to editing, or maybe it was just a lack of energy, trying to pull this project off while classes were still in session, at work. We should have been reviewing and downloading footage from the very beginning. Instead, I/we left it until the Sunday before the deadline. The net result: Anne-Marie and I were editing until 5:00 AM on Monday. That said, I don't think we cut corners where it mattered. We did make one risky choice, and that was to set the bursts of music in the final film at a noticeably higher level than the conversation. Like the visual design, which looks very stiched together, cut-and-pasted from different media, this was meant to nod in the direction of our subject: punk is supposed to be loud and assaultive, and we wanted to capture that. However, I've found that this does not necessarily translate in the viewing experience. Once I explain the concept, everyone has an "ahhh" moment, but I think that we're so used to seamlessness and "perfection" in film, that it is hard not to assume that a wildly variable soundtrack is a "mistake." We'll see. In any case, Kerry Kincanon did great work on Sunday picking out music clips to use in the film. I can only imagine how much longer we would have been at work if he hadn't put in the time to select and excerpt the songs.

For the record, the 2007 Willamette Valley Film collective were, besides myself: Maren Bradley Anderson, Anne-Marie Deitering, David Doellinger, Meghan Flickinger, Kimberly Jensen, Kerry Kincanon, Doug Smith, and Robin Smith.