Seventh Stop: Production Notes

My first reaction to the video assignment was: oh, no. I have to learn a new application. Every time I do, I fear that I won't be able to understand how to use it, and this case was no different. In spite of my worries, I was excited because editing is such a crucial part of film and media making, and I wanted to know and understand the basis of it. So I decided to overcome my new-software-phobia, and just dive into it and be confident that I have nothing to fear. Of course, having a partner helped a lot. My partner Jenni came up with the pitch for the assignment – what Hunter College listens to – and I loved it. Planning the shoot was fun, because we incorporated both of our ideas in it and we both shared a vision of how the video should look like. I really enjoyed the shooting part, too. At first, Jenni and I were worried that no one would want to be interviewed to our short documentary, but we were pleasantly surprised. By the end of the shoot, we had a lot of material to work with, which was great. Up until that point, everything was pretty much going according to plan. However, technical problems seem to follow me wherever I go, and when the editing process began, you guessed it; we had a lot of them. When we went over the clips, we found out that the built-in microphone of the camera did not capture well the outdoors sounds, so some of our clips were unusable. In the future, I think it will be better to use a separate microphone because of the importance of sound in film and media. After choosing the usable footage and editing it for three hours the first time, we encountered technical problems related to the network and couldn't save our project. We were able to save a clip version of the project and knew that next class, we would have to start the project again using the video clip version as a reference. What we didn't know, is that we had lost all the data that was saved in the sequence. So, we ended up spending our last lab class converting the videos all over again. The next day was our last chance to make it work – and we did. We worked really hard on editing the videos, the transitions between them, and combining songs that fitted perfectly with the interviews. And we were very happy with the result. In this process, I learned that editing is a very hard and tedious thing to do. In addition, I learned that editing is a very long process and now I understand why: Jenni and I edited our 3-minute documentary for over four hours (!). Now, I pay much more attention to editing in films and TV series that I watch and am able to identify the editing techniques that are used. Now that I know what editing entails, my interest in it has grown tremendously as well as my appreciation for editors in general.