I asked Heather to recount her experiences in Egypt during the 2011 revolution for the TFPDT editing exercise. She spoke for 17 minutes in total, and the biggest challenge was to cut that material down to two minutes while maintaining narrative coherence and the structural integrity of her sentences. She warned me beforehand that she’s not a natural storyteller, so I had to occasionally chime in and remind her to speak in terms of what she saw or felt, and to paint a picture of what she experienced, so it took quite a bit of cajoling to get enough material to use. It also made it challenging to edit down, because I almost had to manually shape fragments of her story into a succinct, coherent whole.

Being in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution or walking down a deserted street and being stopped by a van full of men wielding machetes are the kinds of experiences that a natural storyteller could turn into quite compelling first-person narratives, but Heather was almost embarrassed by the idea that I was asking her about what happened. She’s naturally very modest and I think she didn’t want to come across as if she was big-noting herself for being close to a major world event, which is an impulse I understand, but she told the story with a lot of self-deprecation — which certainly doesn’t help the process of making a documentary about her experiences!

But having said all that, there were some major advantages in filming Heather for this exercise — she had a selection of photos she took while in Egypt that could be used for cutaways, and there’s obviously a wealth of archival material about the Egyptian revolution that I could use to illustrate what she was talking about. The major disadvantage is that I couldn’t think of any relevant B-roll footage to shoot. It would have been easier if she was talking about a hobby or something like that, so I could film her participating in that hobby, but since she was speaking about an experience in the past it was difficult to think of anything to film in the present.

Ultimately, there were pluses and minuses to this first assessment exercise and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into something a bit more in-depth.