Editing: Gods in the Making

Jaden Bowen
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read

So after weeks upon weeks of filming our short documentary, ‘Gods in the Making’, it was time to hit the edit suite with my editor Jake Holroyd. We had 15 hours of footage. The desired length was six and a half minutes. All of this had to complete in a few weeks. Not an easy task for a first time director. So with coffee in our hands, the script by our side, and surrounded by screens, we went to work. What I want to share with you all are some of the challenges we engaged with to finish this documentary.

For any documentary, overlay plays a key part in reinforcing the narrative structure, and ideas being presented through interviews or narration. Luckily for us, we had shot over five hours of the overlay, which helped us tremendously. Not only were we able to show what our interview subject was talking about, we were able to cover any cuts in the interview, where we had bridged two sentences together, or removed a long pause. We also had shot two interviews, one had a major lighting problem, which meant we were not going to show it. However, we still utilised the audio. Overlay saved us again here, as we could simply cover over the old interview, and only show the one that was correctly lit. We also took inspiration from the short documentary “The Wizard OZ’, to implement archival footage as the overlay as well. This was we didn’t have to just rely on our interviewee explaining the history, but we could show it as well, reinforcing what he was saying.

Though not everything was perfect with the footage. For example, we had one major problem. Most of our overlay came from shooting the prayer sessions of the group our documentary centred on. The problem with this is that many of shots looked the same, so it appeared that we were reusing shots at times. We also had a problem with some of the shots when it came to grading. There was a sequence set in a lounge room, which was blown out by sunlight, however, the conversation the characters were having was too pivotal to the plot. So we had to wrestle extremely with the colour grade process, trying different exposures, LUTS, and all different effects to effectively make the shot look a lot nicer.

Moving onto audio, this was an entirely different ball game. We had many issues with audio balances. Though we recorded clean audio, for the most part, the difficulty was balancing our the audio levels to make sure they were consistent and didn’t over power each-other. We also had to make sure that our audio didn’t come in too harsh. To accomplish this, we used fades on our audio tracks, to make sure the had a much smoother transition in. In terms of music. We had to source through Epidemic Sound to create a massive library of different sound tracks for us to use. The reason why this was hard, is the tone of our documentary needed to be nailed, and the music was the key to doing this. We had to have something with energy, with a little quirk to it, but still had a serious tone as well. Jake and I searched for hours, for all different kinds of tracks that matched this tone, and then had to experiment with them all to see what worked and what didn’t.

On the subject of music, one of our strongest elements was our music ques. When we found tracks that worked, we were able to sink up different beats in the tracks to the edit. For example, when the reveal of the main character is shown, the track playing introduces a guitar strum, right on the cut. This helps makes the cuts flow together nicely, and also establishes a clean flow through the edit. More importantly, it can help transition through the scenes, and from track to track. Especially our final sequence, where each cut is made perfectly to a music cut, and as the intensity of what our interview subject builds, so the does the music, helping build on that our character is saying.

These are just a few different elements of our editing process that I wanted to cover. Overall being a first time director, this was a great experience for me. Jake and I worked extremely well together and got through each problem as they arose. It was a lot of long nights, but in the end, it was totally worth it for, because we are extremely proud of the end project we produced.

References

Yord, D. (2017). The Wizard Oz. Animal.

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Jaden Bowen

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Hey, I’m an aspiring film maker, with a love for all things documentary and producing, with a side passion for anything that has to do with dinosaurs.

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