0ct 16 2019 By Shufeng Yu
In this group project, I am mainly responsible for video editing, and I also took the job of camera operator in the second recording for the final video. Our group aims to produce a short documentary as the final video, for which we went to the countryside and farm market to shoot footage and interview our targeted interviewees—people who live in the countryside or goes to the countryside for pleasure.
The biggest challenge for me is to make our video like a documentary. As a beginner in media major, I have been taught the storytelling of documentaries, but I haven’t learned about how to edit a documentary. I think film editing is easier than documentary editing. Film has script and storyboard, which decide the order and choice of footages. For the professional documentary, the team will write the proposal before doing it, which includes the treatment that detailing the story structure, the order of each exact scenes and the content of interviews. It’s like a script. Our group didn’t write the proposal for our short documentary, because this was the first time we did this and nobody remembers to do it by following the industry rule. The lack of treatment makes editing harder, and there are a great amount of footage await me, I need to look through them and find out useful footages. Besides, unscripted responses of interviews mean I need to look through them several times looking for those clips with useful information.
When I began my editing I threw all the interviews into the timeline first, merged them with audio and cut out the interviewer part. Then I put all the good b-rolls into it. After that, I was a little bit lost and didn’t know where to start. The issue I faced at that time is how I should use selected footage to convey the core of our documentary.
There is a YouTube channel called Creative North (2018) that posted a video about tips for documentary editing. In this video the YouTuber says to begin editing with scenes can help to find the structure of the whole story and understand the material better, he thinks scenes can tell the story by themselves without music and too many interviews and voice-overs. While I think this approach might not work to our project. For me, our project is more like an interview-oriented documentary. It’s short and there are only two scenes in it. Besides, we didn’t shoot many b-rolls, which are not enough to construct a complete scene without the support of interviews. His approach is more suitable to those documentaries that have many scenes and a big story to tell since the editor would be overwhelmed by the heavy workload if he or she put all the selected footage into the timeline.
So what I did to start my editing is to rewatch all the interviews and took notes about what interviewees said. Then I selected useful information from my notes, and I put similar information together and decided their order so that I can lead to our core of documentary in the end. B-rolls contribute to the storytelling of the documentary and helps to reduce the dullness. Even though we don’t have much b-rolls, I tried to not use too much talking heads in the video.
When I was looking through the interview footage, I found that our interviewer couldn’t help to make response like “Yeah” and “UH huh” when she was interviewing someone, which I need to edit out since the sound of interviewee is the “voice of God” in our documentary. While some of her voice appears between the short pause of the interviewee’s voice, which caused the overlap of their voice, and it’s hard to cut out. Sakula (2015) mentions in his article about tips of the documentary interview that editing out the voice of the interviewer makes the interview sounds unnatural and it ruins the flow. He suggests that the best way to avoid this situation is that the interviewer uses smile and a nod to respond to interviewees’ answer, which I think it’s a great idea. During the editing, I felt a little bit annoyed to zoom in the timeline and accurately cut out the voice of the interviewer, which was quite time-consuming. I believe that the editor can have more room to edit the interview footage, and also interviewees are encouraged to keep answering by the silent response of interviewers.
To be honest, our project is far behind those professional documentaries, I recognized some of the areas in which we went wrong. But It’s a good start to try things that have never been done before. I gained a lot of experience from this project, knowing more about the documentary industry. Also, I have admitted the errors I made which give me a chance to improve next time. I think our group has done a well job in this group program. We have a clear division of works and everyone completed their own job well. While there is still room for us to improve.
If next time I gonna the documentary again, I will do a lot of work in pre-production and production. First, a documentary proposal is needed. It can navigate the structure of the whole story, and everyone in it knows exactly what we should do and how to tell the story. Second, we will remember the technique of documentary interview, responding interviewees with a smile and a nod. And then, we will shoot as much b-rolls as we can, so that eliminating the limitation of editing due to lack of footage and developing the storytelling of our documentary. If the documentary has many scenes, then I will adopt the method of YouTuber channel Creative North. It can get me into the editing quickly and make it high-efficient.
Reference:
Creative North 2018, Documentary Film Editing - Learn Best Video Edit Tips, Techniques & Types, YouTube, Creative North, viewed 15 October 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcaEH7W2D5I>
Sakula D 2015, 9 Tips for Shooting a Documentary Interview, Raindance, viewed 15 October 2019, <https://www.raindance.org/10-tips-when-shooting-a-documentary-interview/>