Genesis Student Film Fellowship Updates
The third update chronicles our students dive into post production
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read
As written by InA Choi
(Lightly edited for length and style)
EP 03. Line

Story Line — Time Line — Production Line — Dead Line
What does it mean to construct a ‘story’ in a documentary, a fact-based non-fiction genre? While working under the mentorship of the Great Big Story, this question was the biggest topic for me and ‘story’ was the most important keyword. I really appreciate GBS for making me think about the power of the story through this fellowship.If the bare facts for documentary are compared to a stagnant lake, ‘Story’ in documentary is a stream that started at the lake and flows to the sea. The stagnant water flows down the slope, sometimes it sinks into the ground and rises up again. It also falls from a high or pools at low ground and eventually heads to a large ocean where all the waters meet. The water flowing at this time dramatically changes the landscape and gives birth to life. Creating a storyline in a documentary is similar to giving a waterway to make a landscape as the water continues to flow.What I got from after came back from four days of shooting was a vast amount of interview material and videos. First, I did logging files and transcribed every interview with an editor. I repeated the process of reviewing transcription and continuing to extract core of interview. I felt like I became a scientist who refines it to get the purest crystal in a scientific experiment. So finally I extracted the core elements of the story and then built a story line after many trials and errors.Now, we have the story line on the time line. Ultimately, editing is a digital process, but I hope the story will be analog. I hope the story become not a combination of 0 and 1 but a flow of breath that character speaks. It is pretty tough work. The cuts are cut, but gaps should be soft. Every time I make a film, it is so amazing seeing that story line plays on the time line.After editing, rest of post-production remains, including sound mixing, sound design, composition, and color correction. Currently, staffs are ready and they will work on Tone and Manner in their fields.I know that time is very short, but we do not have any choice. The deadline is approaching but ironically, the deadline keeps us staying alive.
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As written by Ed Hancox
(Lightly edited for length and style)
I think that every person who works in a creative field has parts of the process that make their heart sing, and others that make their stomach clench. For me, the frustrations, the rejection and the long days that are an inherent part of being a doc filmmaker are all redeemed by the joy I feel when I’m out in the field shooting. And then there are parts of the process that feel like nails drawn down a chalkboard, that I just have get through because I know it’s absolutely necessary to keep going forward.For me, that’s writing the edit script.Brainstorming ideas, looking for characters, setting up a shot – all that feels to me like digging around in a box of toys, where everything seems possible and you can’t imagine what it’ll feel like for playtime to end. But at some point, if you want to share something that you’ve created with the world, you’re going to have to take all your playthings and put them in some sort of structure that engages the audience.I know that I can’t just put all my lovely shots in a random order and hope for the best, but boy do I wish that wasn’t the case. Not least because it means saying goodbye to anything that doesn’t further the story – and that inevitably includes all my favourite stuff, as per the writing rule that stipulates you must be willing to “kill your darlings”.So although I appreciate the importance of spending the time on fine-tuning the story – you could argue that it’s the most important part of the whole filmmaking process – it’s always been difficult to motivate myself when I know I have a day of writing the edit script, because I know it’ll be filled with anxiety and self-doubt.But through editing my Great Big Story doc, I’ve found a way of approaching the edit script with the sense of play and exploration that I bring to my shooting, by starting with some raw material to inspire me.When I’m filming, my raw material is the world itself, whatever is within the rectangular frame of the camera viewfinder, something that caught my eye and that I want to capture in a way that sums up my experience of seeing it. Similarly, when I’m writing, I’ve found that poetry works as raw material to get me excited, I suppose because it wakes up the part of my brain that deals with language and structure.Since I’m making a film about snow and ice and other such things, I’ve been reading some poems by Robert Frost, who knew a thing or two about the cold (and happens to have lived not far from where my doc was filmed). Not that I have poetic aspirations myself, and I don’t want you to think I’m putting myself at the level of the bard of New England, but just that I’ve found a way to get through a difficult part of the process with more ease and even a little joy.Happily, I’ve just got through the scriptwriting phase and am deep into one of my favourite parts of the work: the edit itself, when we take the skeleton of a story and put flesh on the bone, working with an editor to finesse the rhythm of the piece until it is just how I like it – that’s when I finally feel like I have a film.

