Hannah's media/film/tv blog

Eric and my job as post-production team was to edit the footage from the seminar into a short (under 10 minute) highlight video. This ended up being a lot more difficult than expected because it is hard to make short snippets of good words of wisdom into something that has structure and makes sense, especially since our guests rambled quite a bit and their stories were long. Our approach to editing was to go through all the footage pick the best bits and then form the structure from there. What we regarded as the best bits were moments that we could apply ourselves, so in a way tangible tips, advice or stories that were new, innovative and interesting, and also things that we could apply ourselves to our own practice.

When we had all our bits and pieces of highlights what we realised was that whilst Dennis and Steve fed off each other with things generally on documentary a lot of Natalie’s stuff was particularly related to her Tote documentary, therefore we realised that we could structure it around Dennis and Steve’s advice with Natalie’s words as examples of that advice or general documentary information.

This still didn’t quite work, because whilst we mapped out some key theoretical groups such as: the ideas, subject and filmmaker relationships and funding they all didn’t quite join together, and it seemed very disjointed. Therefore what we decided to do was to form the content around 10 tips to documentary filmmaking in which we would introduce text and voiceover to give the footage some shape. The tips were quite easy to come by because all guests had something to give in terms of advice for budding documentary filmmakers and therefore we used to text to form a tip in short term and then for them to elaborate vocally on that tip. In which we would add some more text to re-phrase the tip after they had elaborated.

We used voice-over to tie the seminar together into a narrative and to introduce new themes as the occured through the piece. We kept the voice-over to a minimum, yet we wanted to provide context in terms of what the seminar was about and also to give the video some rounding with a beginning and concluding voice just to make it a bit more circular for whoever is viewing it.

I forgot how much I enjoyed editing, because I find it a really creative time, where your footage can turn as you find more threads and themes in the words given to you. Therefore, even though we weren’t editing anything spectacular you can make it better and more thought provoking in terms of how you place things together and then by adding small things such as text, voice0ver and also some of the clips from the trailers of our guests to add a new visual dimension and give the viewing something stimulating to view whilst hearing words that relate to those words.

Overall, I enjoyed this role as part of the seminar team and even though I’m not really keen on the super technical elements of editing I like thinking about editing and how everything relates and then how it could all work together to create something sensical.