Week 8 - Preparing for Post-Production

This week, I backed up the footage and sent a copy to Jakub ready for editing, and he was able to produce a rough cut by Thursday. In preparation of this, Ellie and I spent an hour reviewing the questions and interview footage to create a cut list of clips we wanted to keep or remove. We then created a running schedule for the film, re-organising the questions in the most logical order that we wanted them. Once these plans were written up, we gave these to Jakub, and we held a meeting on Friday to review the first rough cut. Some issues arose from this meeting, such as the fact that Jakub dismissed a lot of the B-roll footage as ‘unusable’. At this point, we knew the documentary had to work on the mix of interview and B-roll footage, and this issue was raised too late for us to reschedule another filming session. Whilst Ky’s footage was shaky, it was within the theme decided upon by Ky and Ellie and therefore was usable. Jakub also told us that he was simultaneously working on editing multiple productions at once, and that raised alarm bells for us as it showed he was not fully dedicated to the project. Ellie and I had an emergency meeting to review the B-roll footage and prepare more editing notes for Jakub. In retrospect, these issues could have been avoided if I had arranged for Ellie and Jakub to edit together in-person. I also take blame for not checking up on Jakub soon enough and making sure that he was following the editing process in a logical way. Whilst I decided not to be editor for this project and therefore could not step on his toes, there were some things that I would have done differently as editor to make the project easier to work with. For example, as we decided to use multi-camera for the interview, I would have sync’d up the two video feeds and one audio feed together, and I would have left colour correction to the last stage of the edit. However, Jakub decided to edit each part where it was necessary and discounting a lot of the second camera footage where it could have been useful to break up the visuals and improve the flow of the film. With all of this said though, Jakub delivered a strong radio edit and the first impressions of the film were good. Our original issues of the film being more like an advertisement remained, however.