During our studio’s Tuesday class, my group and I created our ‘rough rough’ cut. Basically, a cut where we decided the structure of our story and how our documentary film will turn out without the editing technicalities, such as color grading, final intro, effect transitions, etc. Thus, we formed a basic cut of the interview rushes and structure the shots how we wanted it to look like before Thursday when the initial rough cut is due. However, our group had a ton of struggles and difficulties on our particular footages, mostly, our audio recordings.

It seemed that the audio for us have always been the problem. From the first time shooting Terri (our chosen ‘character’) and the ‘Lollie Lovers’ shop, we have issues with background noises and lapel microphone that is attached to Terri. This is because for the first interview the lapel mic wasn’t attached close enough to Terri’s mouth. So, creating an audio that’s not too clear for audiences to hear. Even, our shotgun mic that was used as an alternative route for the audio recording didn’t work out well, as there were a lot of background noises from the crowded marketplace that disrupted Terri’s voice. This led up to a decision for us to film her again.

During our second time interviewing Terri, which was on Friday last week. We knew she wasn’t a fluent ‘storyteller’ as we expected her to be and she wasn’t that comfortable having a camera directing towards her too much. Therefore, we chose to use a zoom recorder, interview her with it and film more B-Roll to go with the audio interview we had. Unfortunately, all the recordings we had that Friday ended up being irrelevant. The reason is: because our group at that time was at a state where we didn’t exactly know which ‘path’ our story was going into from the first meeting, we ended asking questions that were much more out of context than it ever was before. Thus, adding to the problem we had before. Nevertheless, we thankfully did film more B-Roll that ended up being the most useful to the cut.

This week on Tuesday, we finally decided to just work with what we have and maybe film again if we need to. But first really figure out what footages we can work on, instead of heading out without any specific objective. With the help of Rohan, we went through the structure of the story once again and cut all the irrelevant shots together. Rohan helped us on ‘repainting the picture’ once again and gave us a new visual after looking on our interview rushes. He noticed the issue we were having and gave us another idea to work on and that’s exactly what focused on that day. Although, after collating our ‘rough rough’ cut we also noticed that we have some more footages, atmosphere audio recordings and more that were missing (which we will film again on Thursday before the final rough cut is due). We finally had a clear scheme of the documentary.