BATV Editor

Our zoom call went very well. We got footage that can round up the documentary and we were all happy with how it went.

I set to work editing it and about 3-4 hours later it was done and in sequence.

A few hours after I finished we received an email about our hand in regarding the fact that we could choose to submit a ‘plan B’ for the documentary. 5 mins of highlights and a written supporting document on what it was supposed to be.

Under a week until the project is due in. Crunch time.

The good news is that as a group we’ve thought about our project and decided to discontinue two of our projects so that I can focus on the feedback I received for the mental health doc.

This is good news and I’m happy with the more focussed way of working!

Today I recived feedback on my main graduate project film that I am working on.

The content is fine and it looks like a nice film, however it has a very jumbled narrative and a lot of the things we have don’t make snese without some kind of context.

This upset me.

I can fix some of the things that were raised, that’s fine. But some of the things I need to do require resources I don’t have. It is exactly a week until I need ot have all of this handed in as well which is very concerning as while I think I have the time to fix some of the issues, others require whole shoots to acomplish.

You’d think that working from home would be easier than working in say an office or a university.

I’m not so sure.

I am very fortunate that I have dogs and family to keep me company over the COVID-19 lockdown but working on the same PC, on the same projects, in one room, with no social interaction has really taken its toll on my mental health.

I’m not motivated anymore. It’s really sad to think about this but I was really looking forward to my graduate project! It was our shot at making whatever we wanted! But honestly I dread editing it now (For reasons I can talk about in another post) and any of the supporting work just feels the same way.

Things have gone so incredibly wrong during this production and we’ve managed to come out with something at least but it's not what anyone really wanted to do.

Yup.

A good few months of work have now been made redundant. Well, I say that but in reality we can now use them to reflect on as an experiment and something that educated us going on towards the final hand in.

Its a tough one. When you learn to edit by working with people in a room and with specific equipment it becomes harder to work on a project at home.

Sure you get used to it but what you miss is being able to edit a segment and then bounce it off of a producer/director in the same room right there and then.

I guess I miss being able to talk to people instantly about an edit rather than having to render out a segment (Which can take time) and send it to them for feedback (Which could take even more time).

I am fortunate that my home machine is more than powerful enough to run Premiere Pro and work to a sufficient standard however it was prepared to work from university and it a way working at the uni would help productivity with the lack of any distractions and the ability to just knuckle down into the work.

So I figure I’d better deliver an update here about whats going on as I haven’t done in a very long time. I’ve been editing my graduate project! It’s going quite well, there’s a lot to do but Its a challenge I was willing to take. I’ve also been preparing a showreel and tidying up my online apperances with a Linkedin page and so on...

I attended a short sound meeting with our main sound lecturer recently and I would like to talk about a few of the things that we were alerted to when working with a sound designer in post production.

The first thing that caught my attention was that we actually don’t work with the sound editors until picture lock, which makes sense now that I think about it as what would they do while the picture is being moved around. Which moves me on to the fact you really need a solid picture lock otherwise if the sound editors converge their project into yours it will be dramatically out of sync.

To the end I also now see that the post group needs to not only agree to a workflow but then stick to it resolutely to allow for enough time for both sound and picture editors to finish their jobs before out theoretical broadcasts. 

Lastly it is very obvious but the director has to be kept in the loop at all times. If you changed something and then the director didn’t like it after a picture lock then the fallout reaches the entire post production team, which when sound is involved ends up being about twice as large in most cases.

Here we are, All legal and colour corrected.

Low bitrate. Preivew roughcut.

It’s The first step in thsi edit for me. Felliong good about it.

I am going to have to write a learning agreement soon. This outlines what I want to learn in order to give me targets to work towards in the year.

Now obviously these aren’t all going to be the same from person to person, so it’s much more of a personal journey rather than a shared one. For instance my LA (Learning agreement) will have a much heavier shift onto correction rather than practical cutting and sequencing as I feel like I can already construct a narrative perfectly fine so now it’s just making footage look as good as I can. 

I would love to go further into colouring and correction however I understand I am also lacking in some practical skills so I also want to go even further into codecs and data wrangling in order to further improve my workflow and provide greater experience with more ‘bread and butter’ industry skills to cement myself.