Commissions | The Edit + Feedback

Once the shooting period had ended, we were eager to get into the edit as quickly as possible, as this was the longest film we had produced so far on the course.

The first part of the edit we completed was the sync assembly, which meant referring to the transcripts to assemble the footage into an order that made sense in the narrative.  Since two of our interviews were a lot more conversational than a standard interview, this was a bit difficult as there were a number of hesitations and moments where different people speak over each other which was a bit of a challenge to edit around.  Nevertheless we cut down the interviews a great deal and have moved them around the timeline.  Zoe thought that the initial edit was very linear, which we agreed with: the documentary essentially was three acts which led on from each other with little intrigue, so this is something we have changed through the editing process.

In our group, we split up the edit between the four of us.  I took charge of the master edit so once the others had edited individual parts, I put them all together and integrated them into the main edit.  Katie, Jason and Sonia worked on individual sequences: Katie edited the interview with the insurance broker, Jason edited the closing segment, Sonia worked on the opening sequence and the interview with my grandparents - All of us did little tidbits throughout.

I feel this worked well, but the main issue with the edit was working on different systems.  After each day of editing, we would upload the project files onto Google Drive, but if we were working on different systems, we had to spend about half an hour copying the footage onto the system which wasted time that we could have been editing.  I think the only way to prevent this in future would be for me to finally upgrade to a MacBook as my Windows laptop cannot handle too much editing.  This would mean that I would not need to rely on using the same systems at the studios.

From the feedback we received from Zoe and Sam, the overall feeling was to fix the structure of the documentary, so it followed a more non-linear and interesting narrative.  This would mean cutting down the interviews a great deal and pacing each sequence well so that it does not seem to waffle and become uninteresting.  Zoe also said that we need to draw less attention toward me, the presenter, as in the earlier versions of the edit, I was in virtually every shot so the audience would likely get a bit sick of seeing me by the end of it.  Audio is also something that needs to be worked on, which I intend to do once the bulk of the edit is done so I can blitz it all at once.

We had to shoot some pickup shots on other days as well during the edit process, such as establishing shots and G/Vs.

We had some trouble with the closing sequence of the film due to poor lighting, and since we did not have the time to re-shoot the sequence, we opted to try and doctor the footage to remove the grain and accommodate for this.  Gavin recommended and helped us a lot with fixing the grain using a Premiere plugin called 'Neat Video'.  Though there is still some grain, the shot looks a lot better than it initially did and has saved us a lot of hassle with re-shooting which would have been ideal, but with the time constraints became impossible.

For part of the intro sequence, I wanted to introduce the title of the documentary by masking footage of my car driving away so that the title would appear behind it.  I was unsure how to do this, so I looked around YouTube for some tutorials and found this one which helped a lot to achieve the effect I wanted:



Overall, I am satisfied with the final edit.  I would have liked to have got it done faster but everyone in the group pulled their weight and followed my lead which made the process feel a lot more relaxed than my previous projects which I worked on alone.