Production Notes

Well I’m back from my three week trip to Florida. I’m rejuvenated and feeling pretty good. I was able to make both of my films and I’m beyond happy with the footage I was able to get. I returned with over 20 hours of footage for both films. I’ve already imported it all onto my new smokin computer (couldn’t bare the thought of editing one more film on a slow computer). Now I’ve started my trims.

What I learned from my first documentary is to…

1. Not to talk or laugh (very hard to do) at any point after I’ve asked my questions (I didn’t do this in the first documentary and I wound up with a very choppy documentary and it bothered me)

2. Linger between questions to create gaps long enough for smooth editing (this is more for the audio than anything else)

3. Never compromise on getting the lighting right no matter how long it takes.

So far this has made a huge difference in the quality of these two films, compared to my first one.

The firs thing I did when I got home though, is edit ALL the photos I’ll be using for promotion and for the documentaries themselves. There were hundreds of photos to edit but I was able to get them done in a couple of days. It’s nice having an attention span longer then half an hour. :) It’s amazing what you can get done. *A note… when capturing 20 + hours of video, you do have to sit there with it, hour after hour. It’s not like you can drag and drop it over onto the machine. :) Fun.

Anywho, so now I’m just going to go through and do some trimming and separate the interviews since I pretty much captured them tape by tape. Once I’m done with that I’ll watch all the footage again and think about my story and what interviews support it and what ones don’t, then I can think about how to arrange the footage to tell the stories I want.

If I get tired of watching videos, I’ll probably create the opening sequence, lower thirds, and ending credits ahead of time and get those out of the way. I do try to take periodic breaks between editing because it does hinder me a little bit to keep watching them over and over until I’m sick of them. :) So in between the breaks I’ll create the promotional material and websites.

Normally the trailer is the first thing I do, and then I post bloopers and outtakes on YouTube but I don’t think I’m going to do that this time. I’m going to wait until before my first rough edits to do the trailers and not post bloopers and outtakes at all until the films are complete and circulating.

This is kinda serving as my production notes right now so bare with me.

Cheers!