WIP Edit – The Edit Continues

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”.

Many LOZ George, many LOLZ.

Never let perfection get in the way of perfectly good.

General Roy’s Maps

It is a wonderful thing when the man who envisigned the Ordinance Survey map was not only Scottish, but also mapped with tremendous accuracy the lay of the Highlands in 1747 – 1752. Whilst this was obviously to help police the country in a post 1745 rebellion climate, it gives us an invaluable record to reference back to regarding the change of the land and its usage and habitation.

You can find the maps here and browse and print sections for free courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

The WIP continues

Its continues.

The Prologue and Canto 1 are done, just grading tweaks and the odd change, but they are not far away. The visual introduction to Canto 2 is also done.

Filming dates for Canto 2,3 and the Epilogue’s pieces to camera are also set, so all principle photography will be finished by August 1st.

“Sketch” Edits

“Sketch Edits” are a way for me to familiarise myself with what I have shot, and to experiment with how the footage can be cut together. It speeds up the use of the footage when I need a shot from a location for a fuller edit.

It is part of my attritional process of editting. Distilling down from say 20+ minutes of raw footage down to 3 minutes of tone poem, that will become 30 seconds of used footage in a final resolved edit.

Baraka

Baraka, better than Koyaanisqatsi, feels like David Attenborough’s voice is going to echo out in voice over at any second. Explores and is about, everything. Everything. Absolutely everything. It is a mirror to the viewer and humanity.

I first discovered this film on an oil platform in the North Sea, for all of the reputation of oil workers, they are very well informed film buffs as a rule. I was given this as something to meditate before sleep to whilst on the platform. It is a beautifully shot film, perfectly moving you from tone and theme to tone and theme. Moving the filming up and down like a long musical composition.

To say it is a documentary is probably accurate, but totally plays down the films achievements.

Following previous DVD releases, in 2007 the original 65 mm negative was rescanned at 8K resolution with equipment designed specifically for Baraka at FotoKem Laboratories. The automated 8K film scanner, operating continuously, took more than three weeks to finish scanning more than 150,000 frames (taking approximately twelve to thirteen seconds to scan each frame), producing over thirty terabytes of image data in total.

Holy hell that is a technical excercise and a ducking half.

Working Edit

So after some significant amount of filming across the locally accessable wilderness. I have the introduction to the dissertation film more or less locked off.

I have been making sketch and tone/style edits whilst gathering footage. Whilst I have been gathering the raw footage, the structure of the film has been evolving and crystalising. This process of shooting footage, then adding that to the “paper edit” and moving through an iterative process of refining the structure and content of the film has been really very useful. it has helped me identify new material to film and ways of visually illustrating different facets of the whole work.

It is fair to saw that whilst this is essentially a documentary film in genre, I am not a pure “film maker” it is probably more accurate to categorise myself as an artist who uses film making in my practice. With that in mind, the style of my presentation is not very “BBC”, I am not trying to imitate Neil Oliver afterall.