Editing

And there we have it. Day two of editing is over and we’re up to five minutes with a script that’s ready to be fleshed out by a variety of interviews. I love editing and whilst writing this I’m beginning to look forward to tomorrow’s editing. The problem is that I was getting a little tired of being in the same room for so many hours in a day. That’ll change tomorrow as new things occur. We’ve added the sequences to the timeline and it would seem that things are progressing nicely. I have captured the making-of footage for the multicamera project and that should be fun to edit. It will wait until later in the week when the Documentary edit is closer to completion.

Day one of editing has finished and I’ve spent the last two hours resting and relaxing. The editing is quite interesting. We’ve got an interview with someone who was considered as hottest single in the world two or three weeks ago. The documentary is about myspace and it’s effect on the music industry. It’s interesting because we have at least ten interviews, that’s ten points of view, some musical, others more ITish and yet more from the ordinary public. Three segments have been assembled and we have a few more to work on. The duration is only five minutes so far but will progress tomorrow. The rough cut needs to be done by thursday to give an additional week for gathering extra shots and cleaning everything up. I need to make time for the editing of the multicamera project.

Two weeks of editing await me. Both projects have been logged for the most part although now it’s a matter of finding out how to unite all the raw footage, something which may take a few hours. It should be a matter of going through the material and choosing all the most relevant bits, seeing whether they go well together, and then finalising that. Tomorrow I have to work on the documentary. We’ve got a lot of interviews although I’m worried about the shots that can be used for illustrative purposes. I don’t think there are that many location shots, just interview after interview. Tomorrow we’ll see how well they go together.

As I arrived home today, after a slightly more relaxed day I found that two tapes had arrived in the post. It’s the ones from the final fling. I still need to go through them and find usable footage. I’m going to be editing that over the next two or three days, depending on what the work load is for the other documentary. I’m feeling inspired, thinking of the logistics of the first weeks back at uni. First I need to find a home, and once that’s done work on creating an action plan firstly for the year ahead academicaly but also for the smokescreen project. I need to make sure the project is far clearer in people’s minds and check that I have one or two crews that are ready to do the work professionaly, making sure to get a variety of shots for dynamic video productions.

It’s the fourth day of the FIBA championship so it’s the fourth day where I wake before 0400 european time. I wouldn’t mind staying in bed a bit longer. I’m starting to understand the game better and I’ve seen that certain teams are far more entertaining to watch than others. On friday it’s a day of rest. My dissertation research is currently stagnating as I’m so exhausted by the time I get home. The Lebanon edit is finished for the moment so I should be less tired, at last. On the sixth there’s a projection of the full program so far. I’ve just thought back to my Tanzania edit and how I used to have a mentality whereby making longer documentaries was better than short ones. It’s a mentality I lost when in England whilst doing my HND. I was brought up to concentrate on using screentime as efficiently as possible, forgetting that occasionaly it’s important to let things breath. In December the same documentary will be around 50 minutes long.

The next two weeks or so shall see me resting but not from media work. There’s a good chance I’ll be working on a project about a Prison in the Lebanon. It was shot a few weeks ago and the person in charge of the project needs help with the editing. It looks as though it’s going to be an interesting project. I’ve already viewed quite a bit of footage, read the voice over text and discussed the idea. I’ve started to form some ideas of how to create the story and tomorrow this should progress further with me going in to work. In around two weeks I’ll have an interesting work shift, from 5am to 1300 hours, in other words my work day will be finished when other people get their work day started. We’ll see how that goes anyway. Ciao for now