Day 7 & 6
Originally I thought I'd name this show Recognizing Mortality. I've
heard that if you want people to find your posts you need to give them
names that reflect the general nature of your content. I thought that
fit because editing requires you to face the death of so many things,
ideas, hopes, illusions, favorite bits, not to mention your own
inflated ego. However, oblique, inside-joke titles, while clever, don't
have much value if no one gets them, or listens. So I decided to change
the title to something that at least will show up in a search on film
or editing. Am I selling out my art for convention or monetary sake?
I don't know if Holistic Film Editing is any better, but I think it's
appropriate because in this show I'm all about working the entire story
on one timeline, making sure everything works together. There I go
repeating myself. Forgive me if it seems like I'm continuously in
search of what I mean, but, well, I am.
One of the requirements for graduation, besides finishing this film, is
to give up a minute of the film, uncompressed, that will be shown
during graduation. It's a great idea, but I begrudge every distraction
at this point in time. My film is very rough still, so I had to pick a
minute of footage and clean up the audio, do a little color correction
and make sure i t was coherent before I could export it. Fortunately I
had a segment that I had already done some finessing. Still, a
distraction.
Right now I'm taking the segments I've created and place them in order
on the timeline so they work as a whole. That involves making changes
at the beginnings and endings of each, so there's a comfortable,
natural transition in terms of ideas. This is pretty tricky and I'm
finding that, where it's difficult to accomplish that, I may have to
choose to radically change one segment or the other to make the
transition coherent. Either that, or I need to add more footage to make
the transition, or lead-in make sense. And you know, by transition, I
don't mean a transition effect, I mean adding clips that allow the
viewer to make the leap from one idea to the next.
Here's a couple lessons that I've been learning during the past few
days while editing. I'm pointing them out here because doing the edit
is where they've become real. All the preparation, classroom
instruction, friendly advice wasn't enough to take this to heart.
Editing, especially against a tight deadline is what has really brought
it home to me.
