Now if you remember last year, The Hard Part documented the hardest and most tasking part of my EXTENSION - Film Opening. And long story short, I basically spent a whole week and a half animating at least 6 to 8 hours each day. Now I didn't spend 2 weeks in post-production for this documentary, but that’s not to say it was easy. After filming each interview, Clara and I would each loosely transcribe them in order to plan a final structure and make editing easier. Two of the three interviews were nearly an hour long so it was a lot to look through, and a lot more that wouldn’t make it into the 5 to 7 minute documentary runtime.
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| The only photo I could find of the editing process |
When it came to actually editing after filming b-roll, it was annoying. We had already written out our plans based on the transcriptions of the interviews, but scrummaging through hours of interviews and hours of b-roll made it daunting to even start. For me the hardest part was making a flow that bridged together a wide array of subtopics without a voice over. The beginning was especially hard for me, since I knew how I wanted it to begin, but I needed to find a way to start with b-roll that looked establishing, clips that had diegetic sound/nat pops, allowed room to include the very beginning of the interview, and most importantly flowed well. I probably spent an hour and half trying to make the first minute of the documentary; I put in over 10 different clips into the timeline to see if it flowed and none worked. Eventually I got it to work, but bigger issues seemed to rise.
The first issue I ran into was that we were initially going to have both of the photographers introduce themselves at the beginning, but it felt repetitive and didn’t flow with the b-roll or the grander structure. We cut William’s introduction since we couldn't have it flow at the beginning and it felt like a speedbump including it over a minute into the documentary, so decided to keep it concise and just keep what we needed.
Another big decision we made was to cut out the social media influencer completely. When we planned the structure, we found a way to introduce the influencer, but as we were literally making the rough draft of the documentary the tone ended up different to what we had planned; not a terrible thing, but it just felt odd to introduce the influencer almost halfway through the documentary. Her interview also didn’t provide a super didn’t perspective to social media and authenticity. She said that much of what is success on social media is fake, which is similar to what the photographers thought of social media.
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| Second to last editing session. We were hard at work |
After about 18ish hours of editing we had only a few small things let to add, so we left them for the last editing session. During the last session, my computer began to act up more than usual so I restarted and it said there was something wrong with the F Drive, a.k.a. The hard drive I use for bulk storage and that we had used to save the project. I restarted again and it wouldn’t even turn on. Now a week before I had been interviewed by my buddy John about an SD of mine from 2019 that corrupted all my footage from a project, and how I dealt with it for his documentary (Biases aside I thought it was cool, Check it out). While a relatively small project, that day when I lost my footage really hurt me and almost made me contemplate pursuing film as a career.
Flashforward a to the final editing session and I’m beginning to see parallels to that day with the SD card. My computer wasn’t responding, and it reached the point where me and my dad had to open up the PC tower to see what was wrong. During this whole process, I kept thinking about how much a single SD with 1 project impacted me, and now here I was with my PC of 5 years thinking that the worst was going to happen. My Dad’s uncertainty and Clara looking up if Adobe Premiere projects can be recovered wasn’t helping. I believe I began to have a panic attack and went to another room to catch my breath for a few minutes. When I came back my dad was running probably the 3rd diagnostic on the computer. When it was complete he went to restart it again and after what felt like a lifetime of looking at the Dell logo, the computer finally loads to show the login screen. We all seemed cautiously optimistic as I typed in the password. When it went through, the F Drive was working again. Everything was still there.
The wave of relief hit me like a truck and I almost burst into tears right then and there (luckily for me that only happened about 10 minutes later B] ). I told Clara that I was going to make a backup of my files and then we’d meet up again later in the day to finish the doc. And that’s what we did, we finished up, sent it to others for feedback, and then submitted. I was really happy with how it came out, both as my first try in the documentary format as well as it being the longest short form project I’ve completed. And the whole experience is something that has engraved this project in my brain. And I’m thankful for all the ups and downs that occurred. We hope to share a definitive cut soon, but for now here's the link to the version that was submitted for the initial due date. I simply can't wait to share more info about the next big project.
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| Post Submission Pic |
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