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.

Documentary Unit: Sync Assembly

Mary and I have made a lot of progress recently. Once we'd finished transcribing, we took to highlighting the most important parts of everyone's dialogue. This took some time as we needed to be thorough, but once it was done it made it incredibly easy to begin editing. By splitting the workload again, we each edited every individual clip, making sure to keep our highlighted parts and cut out anything unnecessary. Once this was completed, we put our work together on the Final Cut timeline and reviewed it. While our sync assembly is currently far too long (approx. 23 minutes!) it's a great start for our editing process. We can now begin to add cutaways, actuality shots and sequences and fine tune the documentary - and of course shorten it to 10 minutes!

I think that Mary and I managing our workload very well and making a lot of good progress on our documentary every day. I already feel like the documentary is off to a very good start.

A page of our highlighted transcript

Documentary Unit: Transcript

Today Mary and I went through our footage and began to transcript it. There was a lot to do as luckily we have a lot of footage as well as a big variety of footage to work with. So we split the workload and got everything down in detail. We did run into the problem of the entirety of Carl and Michelle's transcript (the biggest one) that Mary was working on not saving properly and vanishing! So luckily, as everything else we did is complete, we had to split the transcript for that and complete it separately.

Now that the transcript is finished it will be a lot easier for us to start editing, as it will allow our sync assembly to flow nicely and we can cut out the unneeded parts of the documentary in a very organised and timely way.

A page of the transcript

Documentary Unit: Editing Workshop

Today we had an editing workshop with a BBC editor. It began with him telling us of his editing experiences and his process. He followed this by giving us advice on the best ways to edit our work.

We then moved on to editing individually. We were given a transcript from a documentary shoot that our tutor filmed and were told to cut down each clip so that we were left with the most useful lines from the interview transcript. After this we were given the freedom to cover the interview how we liked with the provided cutaway/actuality clips.

With the footage we were given, I think I was able to make quite a smooth piece of work. Some of the clips were a bit hard to work with due things such us out-of-focus shots and camera shake. And I have to admit that the interviewees weren't particularly entertaining to watch, but I think with the actuality and sequences, it makes the short 'documentary' piece rather interesting.

I think that today was helpful practice for beginning to edit mine and Mary's work in an effective way.

Here's my work from today...

Documentary Unit: Kent Pride Shoot

The last bit of filming Mary and I had left to do was an interview with Vicki, the organiser of Kent Pride. So we travelled to Canterbury where she allowed us to film her in her office. I found that she was very easy to interview, every question we asked her was followed but very detailed answers. Such as asking her about what Kent Pride does for homosexual teenagers, and her saying very inspiring words about her life when she was a teenager and how she wants teenagers today to have more help.

While the interview was great, we did struggle to get a lot of coverage, due to her office being very small and limited on space, and our battery being faulty. This meant that we had to have the battery on charge while filming, and couldn't move very far. However, her office being small worked to our advantage when it came to our battery issue, as we were able to film almost everything from one position. We picked out useful and interesting sequence shots from her office including Kent Pride posters and Vicki's fundraising chart, as well an actuality shot of Vicki writing a Kent Pride blog post on her computer.

I think that the Kent Pride section of our documentary will be really helpful and informative for the audience. I think that with the limitations that we had, we did a very good job of covering her interview and the cutaway shots.

Vicki's interview

Sequence shot

Actuality shot

Documentary Unit: Easter Work

Over the Easter break, we've gotten a lot further in our work. We now have three shoots completed with one remaining (assuming we don't decide that we need extra coverage).

Completed shoots...

- Central character Carl's interview
- Carl meeting Michelle - a middle aged lesbian who discussed the topic with him
- Carl and his boyfriend, Kristian

I have to give a lot of credit to Mary where it's due, as she had to film the meeting with Michelle and the coverage of Carl and Kristian on her own. However, having decided exactly what would be discussed and filmed when planning our documentary before Easter, we can agree that the ideas for both shoots are joint.

As Mary and I filmed Carl's interview together, I can discuss our central character's shoot. We made sure to work off of our script beforehand, by deciding what Carl would talk about and act out in advance, we were able to be very well organised and schedule everything perfectly. We had him introduce himself and discuss things such as his childhood, coming out to his family, his time at school and what he looks forward to in the future. We encouraged him to be himself and try not worry about saying everything exactly the same each time we filmed a topic that he discussed. Luckily Carl's a very naturally confident and upbeat person, so he was very good at being interviewed.

We filmed this in his bedroom, as it's the most personal place he could be. I think it will make the audience feel closer to him and his story. As well as filming the interview in his room, we had him act out one of his hobbies of playing the piano and singing and looking through family photos, these will make very good sequence/cutaway shots. We've also got scanned copies of his family photos to use in the documentary. Our other sequence shots involved wide shots of his street and close-ups of items in his room such as his artwork and stuffed animals.

And lastly we filmed a more emotional part of his story. We took him back to his old secondary school. We've been told that we don't have permission to use the school's name in our film, so we were only able to get the one shot of the school that didn't have the school name/logo in it. We had a short interview with Carl in front of the building (as he was very uncomfortable being there) and he discussed how it felt to be back outside of the school.

I think this shoot went very well. From the material that we've got of Carl, the audience will really get to know him. With the addition of his meeting with Michelle and introducing his boyfriend, we've got a lot to work with now. We will next be interviewing Vicki from Kent Pride, and will gather archived footage from her.

Screenshots of Carl's shoot