process

Editing preparedness by Daniel Stephens

It's late Sunday night, early Monday morning and while sleep would be a natural enterprise in which to be currently engaged, it seems to be fleeting at the moment, thus, a blog entry.

Tomorrow (well, technically today), we begin preparing the studio for a four week editing session for the musician documentary we have been working on over the last year. It would be lovely to state the name of said musician, but we've been kindly asked to refrain from doing so. 

Our preparations include organizing the over four (4) terabytes of footage we've acquired over the last twelve (12) months (that's 300GB/month to you and me) into easily accessible, well-tagged batches (technically folders and files with a pile of meta-data attached) and having the last four or five interviews transcribed. There will also be a passel of audio-syncing to complete as a number of our filming escapades involved multiple cameras and double-system sound - though it's a tedious process, it's actually one I find quite meditative. Though I wonder if Brian, who will actually be doing the audio-syncing, will find it so. 

Once the project is prepared for editing we'll have a spate of long, fun, quirk-filled, idea-tossing (and did I say long) meetings to discuss a general structure for the film and identify its specific theme set and feel. Actually, much of that was done at the start of the project and with the mid-project production of a rough-cut, but it's good to do this step on a regular basis as sometimes these bits shift during production and identifying that shift and incorporating it into the finished film is often a good thing. And sometimes simply necessary.

Let the preparations begin! Well, let them begin tomorrow (today) after a bit of rest.