The Edit continues to continue, more refined and infuriating with each pass. Between just the creative process of crafting a film in the edit and Premiere updates and crashes trying to kill me, it has been a long road with this one.

If I use the autosaves as a rough form of time recording (and I will!) then I have 244 autosaves from working on this edit, that is one autosave every 15 minutes.

Not counting the first 15 minutes of each editing session, that works out at 61 hours of editing time.

SIXTY.ONE.HOURS.

This is also compounded by the volume of footage involved, at last count I was working with over 8 and a half hours worth of raw shot footage. That is a lot of raw material to craft into a sub 40 minute documentary.

It is said that you write a film twice, once in the writing and once in the edit, I would argue that you in fact write it three times.

Once when you write it, once when you film it and again in the edit. I would also argue that the first two passes at writing a film, even with documentary (or even more so with docs), are more like rough first drafts and that the writing of the films narative is done most in the edit.

But wait you said narative in the context of a documentary!!! FAKE NEWS!?!?! Sigh, no not narative as in creative writing, but a documentary is still telling a story, albiet one based in factual occurances. The film maker is then choosing what to highlight and what to leave in shadow in their interpretation of the events that their film focuses on.

How the documentary film maker is guided in these choices is the subject of a whole other MA project, but trust me when I saw that you are still crafting narative when editing a documentary.

Either way, this edit has been a beast, soon it will be dead, or more likely, as a not so wise film maker once said “abandoned”.

Never let perfection get in the way of perfectly good.