Editing

My aim for this week was to ambitiously attempt to cut together the base of each of the films, without any subtitles or extra footage, working on creating storyboards and the narrative that I want the final films to have. I managed to get all of this done by the end of the week, which is something that I wanted to do so that I could focus on gathering some of the extra footage and looking into the subtitles as well as allowing for time to think about the presentation of the work. 

One problem I have had is that I am still unsure about how many TV’s that I will be using and the way that I will be setting this up. After experimenting with this last week I feel that four will be the correct amount, however I still need to get feedback from my tutor on this idea which is something that I will be doing on Wednesday morning. Nevertheless, I made the base of the films to fit the format of four as I like the way in which they worked together when displayed this way, and it is the quantity that felt right for me. It also meant that I had just the right amount of material to work with. The first step I took was going through all of the transcripts that I had and taking out any bits I thought I would work well. Although the transcriptions took a long time I am pleased that I made the effort at the beginning to go through all of the footage as it made the editing process so much easier! After picking out the parts that I felt worked well I then organised them into the different people and colour coded them so that they were organised into the various questions. I asked five questions during the interviews but they often merged together when having a conversation, because of the number of films I split the selection from the transcripts into four sections: why are you an artist, the audience and communication, motivations and student perception and arts function and the audience perception. It was difficult working out what should go into which section as like I mentioned they often overlapped. After organising what parts were going to be in each question I separated them and copied them into a grid so I could cut these out and visually be able to play around with the order of these and the structure of each film. What is important to mention is that I really focused on the words and what was said more so than the footage. By looking at what was said and creating a story board this meant that the words became the most important aspect of the piece, the footage is secondary. It has also made everything flow better, as the words connect. After working out the order in which I wanted the films to go it was a case of finding that specific part in the footage and cutting them together into one. The transcripts made it easy to pick out where the different sections were, so again this process was a lot faster than I initially thought  it would be. 

I am pleased with the way that the footage connects, however there were certain sections where the image didn’t work well and didn’t fit with what was being said. In these cases I deleted the footage from the film and plan to source some other smaller clips of people working in the studio, with materials or perhaps close-ups of peoples work. I have already started to gather these and I feel that it will make the film more interesting as there would be a balance between the stationary footage and the movement. Each of the films ended up being about 5 minutes long which is something that I did not plan for, it just happened. I have added a bit at the end of each film where it is just black as sometimes the DVD players have had a problem with the looping, however this is something I will fine tune at a later date. My aim was to cut all of the basic footage together and then play them all on the screens at the same time, however I realised that without the subtitles it is difficult to engage and see if something works well or not, therefore I will wait until I have finished the subtitles and added the extra footage in which will be my next step with the films. I know that adding the subtitles is going to take a while however I have gotten used to the process now which will mean that I will be able to do it fairly quickly. I need to get this done sooner rather than later so that I can check to see how they look visually, the looping, the size of the text, the readability and if there are any mistakes with the editing that I can go through and change. Next week I also have to focus closely on how I am going to present the work, as this is something that may also need time to fix any mistakes or problems.