Edit Foundry

Last Saturday I won an Emmy for a documentary I edited last year.

I loaded the documentary in 4 parts on The Edit Foundry YouTube Channel

Part 4 is the 15th video down on the list.  I used that part for a discussion on Using Music.

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The documentary,  Journey of Hope, is the story of Scott Orr and his decision to have life changing brain surgery.  This surgery would help with the tremors associated with Parkinson’s Disease.  This documentary was by far the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done at a television station.  It challenged me on so many aspects of editing and production.  It pushed me as an editor to use every skill I developed.  So, I’d like to share some things I learned along the way that may help you if you ever get a chance to edit something like this.

I didn’t capture a lot of the video for this.  In fact my photographer, Dave Wertheimer, captured a majority of the video for me.  I still went threw every tape.

• Logging is extremely important process especially in anything long form.

I edited this is in Avid. Here is some things I did before I  started editing

1. Every time a shot changed I put a locators on the video (F3 in Avid).  That way I could toggle between EVERY SHOT.  So as I watched every tape that was captured I added locators.  Most of the time I watched the video at either two or three times speed.  I didn’t have time to watch everything in real time.
   

2. I sub-clipped A LOT.  I sub-clipped interviews, the surgeries, at the race track, head shaving party, etc.  So later I could just go to the subclips and looked a smaller amount of media at once.
   

3. I had a different bin for each tape the photographer shot.  VERY important for organization and for sanity.
   

4. I had additional bins for music, graphics, sequences, etc.

5. I made sure my media was as organized as I could possible have it.

I went through all the video and got very organized.  I got the reporter’s logs.  I made mental and written notes.  No notes on paper.  All my notes were in Avid.  Using the locators to tag video and write things about my video within the locators.

• Double click on a locator in Avid and you’ll be able to type text associated with that locator.
  

The next thing I did was figure out music.  Before I started editing I wanted the music to help set the mood.  I wanted the all the music to feel like a score in a movie. So the whole documentary would feel like it had music composed for it.  Obviously I didn’t have music composed.  But I did find a soundtrack that worked well.  I’m a big fan of Thomas Newman.  He’s composed music for many films like Finding Nemo, Pay it Forward, and Cinderella Man.

I decided to use the soundtrack to the movie Erin Brokovich

I chose this for several reasons.

1. It’s a great soundtrack

2. I liked the selection of music I could choose from within this soundtrack

3. The movie came out in 2000 so it wouldn’t be fresh in the viewer’s mind.

I never use anything TOO popular.  I  want the viewer to have as little emotional contact with a song as possible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 am Filed under General Assignment and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.