Documentary Unit: A Lot of Editing

Today I spent approximately 7 and a half hours of straight editing. To have everything neat and ready for our last fine cut viewing tomorrow and submission the day after, I edited as many things as possible. I firstly needed to cut our time down, it's been tough to cut down mine and Mary's work - which is why our original cut from our transcript was 23 minutes long - but today I managed to cut it down from 12 minutes to 10 minutes and 20 seconds.

I then spent a lot of time changing some cutaways all including pride footage, shots of Carl and images, due to feeling that the new ones I've added are stronger to the story. But the two things that have taken the most time and detail have been fine tuning the sound and colour correction. 

Due to an error on our mic, all of our sound was only coming out of one speaker, so I firstly needed to correct that, I then moved on to changing the volume on all of the clips, as they varied in volume to each other. There were also a lot of glitches in the sound and certain sentences that had been cut together didn't flow, so I removed all glitch sounds and created gaps in the sentences to tidy them up.

After this, I colour corrected every clip. As they were all slightly lacking in vibrance and colour (which I think can be the obvious difference between an amateur looking film and a professional one). Now that I've done this, I think the documentary looks a lot more fresh and eye-catching. The only issue that I ran into with colour correcting was with Michelle's interview, as the light from outside continues to change dramatically throughout. It's quite noticeable but I don't know how to fix it in a smooth looking way, so I'll ask for both Mary and our tech support's opinions tomorrow.

The last thing I did was add a soundtrack to the documentary. Mary and I both liked a royalty free acoustic track that we tested so I used it for the remainder of the documentary. I didn't want it run throughout as I think it takes away from what the characters are saying. So I added it to sequence clips with commentary and for the introduction and closing credits.

I think with all of the progress Mary and I have made in the last few weeks, and the fine touches that have been put into place today, our documentary looks great. I think I'm going to feel very positive when submitting it.

Our almost completed timeline