Documentary Unit: Editing

Our work is really starting to come together now that our documentary is under 10 minutes long. When it totalled at 23 minutes it all felt a bit messy and unorganised. Now that Mary and I have spent the day cutting each section of the documentary down dramatically - taking out the lesser needed discussions - we've taken roughly 14 minutes away, which feels like great progress.

Our tutor then watched our sync assembly and thankfully, was impressed. Having loved our central character's personality, story and part in the documentary, as well as our other characters consisting of his boyfriend Kristian, Michelle, and Vicki, she only felt the need to give us a few notes so far. These being that we should...

- Rearrange the order of central character Carl's introduction

- Slow down his fast storytelling with cutaways

- Remove his introduction to his name, age and sexuality, and replace it with commentary on this

- Add travelling shots when Carl visits places

- Build up Carl and Kristian as a couple with shots of them in their life

- Make sure to leave from one thing to another in the commentary and turn a corner - for example "When comparing Michelle's experience in the 90s to Carl's experiences today, we can see that society isn't quite as accepting of gay people as we may have thought. However there are supportive services available..." [cut to Vicki]

We've already began adding introductory shots and sequences to the documentary, as well as making the changes that our tutor suggested. As you can see in the picture below, we've began covering Carl's first interview/introduction with personal sequences and cutaways. We should make even more progress on this when editing tomorrow.