In January, 2011, Heather arrived in Egypt for a month-long holiday with friends. Half way through her stay, on January 25, thousands of people descended on Tahrir Square and demanded political change, eventually leading to the toppling of Hosni Mubarak and what we now call the Egyptian revolution.

Here are three edits of my interview with Heather. I’ve written more about the interview process in a separate post.

In this edit I kept everything Heather said in chronological order, and took out anything irrelevant or unnecessary to the main thrust of the story. This resulted in a huge number of cuts in my timeline, and I struggled to find enough cutaways and archival material to cover them all.

This is the edit that most closely resembles the conversation as we had it, but it’s also very plain and not at all dynamic. It accurately reflects how she now talks about her experiences in Egypt, with a mixture of humour and modesty that doesn’t do her story any favours but does help her come across as a friendly and likeable person. I decided to leave in the anecdote about setting up an Abbey Road photo shoot in front of riot police because it’s a good story (and has an accompanying photo), but it undercuts any sense of danger or tension in the story. I also decided to take out the story about being approached by the van, partly for time and partly because it didn’t seem to match up with the tone of this edit.

Heather had a habit of idly looking out the window while she was talking, so her eyeline kept moving to the left of screen instead of into the empty space of the frame, so half way through the interview I had to move myself further to the right and ask her to try to look at me when she was speaking. I think this embarrassed her (for “doing it wrong”, even though I assured her it was my fault for not setting up the interview properly), and as a result she speaks really quietly from when she starts to talk about going to Pete’s aunt’s house for dinner. This was a nightmare to edit around, because I felt it was necessary to set up that part of the story (to give a sense of time/place), but it’s so obviously different from all the speech around it that it sticks out like a sore thumb and draws attention to the fact that it’s from a later part of the conversation.

I also left a few jump cuts in the interview, but only at points where she’s moving to a new conversation or topic from what came before. I was hoping that this would feel natural (and signal to the audience a move to a new topic) but I’m not sure it really works as I’d hoped it would.

To cut down the amount of setting up required, I begin this edit with an explanatory title. Just having 15 seconds of titles saved me almost a minute of interview time I could spend elsewhere, so I tried to take advantage of that and go deeper into the incident with the van.

This edit has more (and longer) sequences that are allowed to play through without any cuts, so it feels more like Heather is telling her story and I’m not piecing it together in the edit. It feels more “real” and accurate than the first cut, because there are fewer obvious places where I’ve used B-roll cutaways to hide an edit (which signals to an audience that words have been rearranged). Seeing Heather speak for more extended stretches I think also helps identify with her, because you see her face a lot more in this cut than the first one. There are also more “ums”, “ahs” and laughs in this one, which encourages identification and a more organic feel.

I decided to use music underneath the section where she talks about being approached by the van. I think this subtly changes the tone enough to make it clear that Heather found the incident scary, even though she’s talking about it with humour in the present. Finding the right song was difficult (and in fact I selected this song mainly because it works for the third edit), but for a royalty free song it ticks the right boxes in terms of mood. I struggle with audio mixing, so I’m worried that the music might be too low in the mix, but any louder and it starts to make Heather more difficult to hear (particularly with headphones).

My working title for this was the “in media res” cut. After hearing Heather in the interview talk about being approached by the van, I immediately wondered if it would be possible to start the video there, and then later go back and explain the context of the Egyptian revolution.

This is by far the most dynamic of the three edits, with extensive manipulation of cinematic style (prominent music, more incendiary looking archival footage), but I also think it’s fair to say it’s the most dishonest. The tone in which Heather’s words are translated to the screen is very different to the tone she used when speaking them, and I used style choices to change her story into something more in line with what I was expecting when I asked to interview her about her experiences in Egypt. This edit suits my needs as a filmmaker, but doesn’t reflect Heather’s retelling of her own story. (But then again, I think an argument could be made that this edit more accurately reflects Heather’s actual experience, regardless of how modestly she speaks about it now.)

The fact that you don’t see Heather’s face until almost 30 seconds into the video undermines relatability and identification, but in its place this edit offers a more visceral, subjective experience. I also didn’t colour grade this cut, so the colour temperature of the interview is slightly cooler than the previous two versions.

The introduction works quite well, as does the first transition into Heather speaking about the context of why she was in Cairo, but I don’t think it quite works when transitioning back to the incident with the van to finish off that part of the story. Had Heather spoken more in a present-tense, first-person point of view I think I could have pulled it off, but I don’t think it’s the right fit for the material I had.

This cut uses some B-roll I shot with Heather walking down the street at night (I was hoping for an association with walking down a dark street), but it’s not really relevant enough to look suitable. I should have shot her walking down a deserted back street and asked her to act a bit more like it was a reenactment (perhaps even wait until a van drove past), but she was very uncomfortable even with the amount of filming I was already asking her to do, so I didn’t want to push my luck.

Credits

Photographs supplied by Heather Scott, used with permission.

Photograph of the Egyptian Museum by Bs0u10e01 (CC 3.0 BY) <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/The_Egyptian_Museum.jpg>

The Egyptian Revolution: In February 2011, millions of Egyptians came together to overthrow their leader, Hosni Mubarak [online]. Four Corners (ABC1 Melbourne); Time: 20:33; Broadcast Date: Monday, 19th March 2012; Duration: 44 min., 3 sec. Availability: <https://search-informit-com-au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=TEV20121207316;res=TVNEWS> [cited 23 Mar 18]

Mo Rooneh – “2,3,4” (CC 4.0 BY-SA) http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mo_Rooneh/MaCHiNe/03_234