Week 13: Monday’s Tutorial

Week 13, otherwise known as “crunch time” by many panic-stricken students on campus, today’s tutorial saw the entire classroom in the editing suites to continue editing the final cut version of our documentary, that is to be submitted during Thursday’s tutorial.

Here, we were given the opportunity to sit down with our tutor and provide an update on our footage, our progress in editing and how much more needs to be done both technically and with our interview subjects. As Claudia and I had only just re-recorded Jenna’s interview on Sunday, the day before, Kim understood our limitations and how this had delayed the process of editing her piece together. While we had more setbacks than work to show our tutor, today’s tutorial served as a good time to get together with my group mates to review our recent footage and how we can thread her audio and video clips together.

For the remainder of the tutorial, we reviewed Jenna’s footage and used this time to pick out key quotes, time stamping where she mentions these quotes and inserting these on the shared Google document. We ensured that the quotes we made note of had addressed notions of identity and neighbourhoods; whenever Jenna spoke about her contrasting living conditions in Melbourne compared to her home in California, or how meeting like-minded individuals, both male and female at the skatepark, we ensured that this would go in the final documentary.

Indeed, because Jenna had no other availability but to film on Sunday, our group was left on a tight schedule when trying to edit everything together before Thursday’s tutorial arrived. We found that while we had an array of beautifully shot footage, there seemed to be an abundance of footage to sift through and categorise, to the point that my group and I were extremely overwhelmed by the amount of footage to consider and review. In order to alleviate our qualms, we put together a storyboard detailing, from the opening to the ending sequence, what details need to be addressed first. What kind of b-roll we want to correspond with the narration and the kind of narrative progression that we were trying to achieve. This helped significantly in organising the way we edited our footage and gave us a direction and guidance when piecing our footage together.