13 – TO EMERALD CITY

These are our adapted notes that we received from Cindy, a lovely editor that was our class expert. She gave us a multitude of things to fix, majority of them minor aesthetic changes (like changing some cuts to fades) and other complete overhauls of structure (like removing some shots entirely and reworking the narrative throughline). This email came to us at a time where we definitely needed it. All 6 of us were slowly loosing our minds, chipping away at this film, which we had intended to be at least 5-6 minutes long, but now has become closer to 3-4. Shaving off so much of some shots has become such a daunting task in our group because no one wants to let go of the work we put into them. However, after reading Cindy’s comments we understood that not all the shots we had could be kept in the long run. The constant trade off between interview footage and montage was too disjointed, and out little musical interludes make the entire film feel like a music video and not the short documentary film it was supposed to be. We didn’t realise this as we made the film, but having that second opinion of someone who has only seen this once let us see things much more clearer. With her feedback we went right back into a new groove of work, and actually figured out a better system of working on a project compared to the way we were editing in the first place. We realised too late that we should not have all been working together on the same thing. No one needs 6 people to be in an editing room at the same time. So we split up into 3 teams of 2, and made a separate copy of the rough cut that we would then collate together into the final super cut. A team had to focus on colour grade, another on sourcing graphics and titles cards, and I was left in charge of audio and sound design. It was a lot of hard work in the end to pull all three pieces together, but we made it work. Individually they all looked like 3 messy films, but when you got to see the new colour grade complimented with the soft music in the background, you could finally feel the doco come together.

I was left in charge of audio work because I was the most familiar with it, but like always, that didn’t mean I was going to be the best at it. In all honesty I enjoy doing sound design, it’s just that by this last week the pressure of the course had finally crept up to me. I felt like it was a lot of stress anchoring me down to that edit suite, and although no one in the group was pressuring me to do the super amazing job that was expected of me, I knew that I had to do a better job than what I had previously done. However, some of that stress was alleviated with some sage words of advice from Rohan, and anytime that Rohan can just sit down one-to-one with you is a treasured moment. I love learning new practical knowledge and he has so much that I would gladly just have that be the class for the whole semester. He showed me a few techniques on how to cover up audio and blend in soundscapes that I was never shown, and he taught me in such a short amount of time that I was grateful that he knew his stuff. This was one of the main reasons I wanted to have another class with Rohan, because he has had proper real life film-making experience. He gets the pressure and has been on my side of the film-making process. Without his guidance and without any of the feedback and support from my group we may not have been able to pull through the funk we were in. Cindy’s comments may have been the kick in the butt we needed, but Rohan helped guide us down that yellow brick road.