Rough and Rough Cut

These last few weeks have been rough. We have been meeting up just about every night for a few hours in hopes of getting a little bit done every day. However, Kristina has been swamped lately and it has stressed her out so much. Jacob and I finally sent her home one night and took over for a while; I think she was pretty grateful. It did her wonders because she came back the next day with a lot more energy and we finished our rough cut.

However, we are having problems again with our project being in standard definition with HD footage. We though we fixed it the first time, but something happened, I don’t even know. We will fix it later, but right now I think we will keep it in standard and not stress ourselves out about it.

Problems

We are having problems. Apparently our project is in Standard definition even though they shot in HD. We were shown how to fix this, but it is very tedious. Hopefully now that it is fixed we won’t have to do it again. There is always something isn't there?

Tone of Our Doc

The tone of our documentary (I’m saying our now!) is hard to pin point. I am not entirely sure right now what Kristina (the director) is going for and I don’t think that she does either. It could be inspiring like Superheroes, showing everyday people dealing with this problem. I believe that it is a serious documentary sprinkled with comic relief, because it is dealing with a serious issue and we shouldn’t make light of it. I think Kristina feels the same and I know it is hard for her to decide when she is looking at herself on the computer monitor, but as I told her from the beginning, this is her baby and the final decision is up to her.

Tones of Other Docs

We were assigned to look at other documentaries and see what their tones are. I viewed Man on Wire, Exit through the Gift Shop, and Superheroes. They are three very different documentaries with very different tones.

The tone of Man on Wire is quite suspenseful and at times it is like watching a heist film, like Ocean’s 11 or something. Even though the film is about very terrifying and deadly stunt, it is very light-hearted. The film uses real life interviews and reenactments to tell the story, but the reenactments look real. There were many times where I had to remind myself that it was an actor playing young Philippe.

The tone of Exit through the Gift Shop is like that of a mystery. The whole time you are trying to fit all of the clues together and find out whether the story could possibly be real. However, whether it is a real documentary or no, the film is still enjoyable.

The documentary Superheroes was my favorite; its tone was quite different. The film deals with kind of a ridiculous situation. It is about real/normal people creating and dressing up as original superheroes and fighting real crime. However, in an indirect way, it is very inspiring. You can’t help but think that they are idiots and geeks, but you also can’t deny that they are extremely brave idiots and geeks.

Starting Out

Okay, so I have been keeping a written journal about my advanced editing class and I keep forgetting to post it here. So now I am going to post everything I have. Even though they will all say today's date, I have actually been writing them since the beginning of the class. So here we go:

I was a little anxious when I started my advanced editing class because I was coming in without a project. I wasn’t sure if I would be working on my own and be creating a found footage film or if I would be grouped with others. It was the latter, and that just made me more anxious. I was coming into a project that other people had been working on for quite some time.

I ended up syncing sound the first week and converting all of the videos so that we would not have to keep rendering every clip every time we made an edit. It was a tiresome first week, but I got to know the project and became very excited about working on it. My partners, Kristina and Jacob, were very welcoming and even though I was not part of the original crew, they appreciate my input.