Edit till we die

Now that we finished filming our interviews, we filmed some final b-roll at the Lightning poet meeting on Tuesday. This is when we were supposed to get an interview from a sponsor, but since J didn’t come to school due to illness and M and I were left to our own devices (and filming at school is harder than filming in the comfort of someone’s home) we decided not to get the final interview, knowing we had 40+ minutes of interview footage already. Of course, this would mean some restructuring for the documentary, but it would all be handled in the edit.

Wednesday passed us by as we discussed restructuring issues in class and collected the archive footage we needed, so Thursday was our final day to work on the edit. On my end, I was responsible for the main edit, but I knew I couldn't accomplish the entire thing on my own so I designated roles for M and J to help me. I did my best to cut down the interviews and fit them into a nice structure, sending them section by section to M and J once they were done, and once the group approved, J would begin putting b-roll over the interview footage while I continued cutting down the next section. 

Trying to convey my idea for the montage for M to create.

In the meantime, we left M in charge of the opening montage, in which she focused most of her energy on making the crappy compiled android footage of poetry performances look good. We had around 17 recordings of different spoken word poems over the years and the goal was to use individual soundbites to establish our subjects as spoken word poets to the audience. 

Then we wanted to put the title graphic after the montage, but at this point, we still didn't have a name, so combining the power from all our brain cells (and asking Google for some poetry puns) we came up with: Off the Mic. Once Juan sent me a video of the Canva graphic, I realized it was all coming together. 

Once M had exported her group-approved montage, I finished adding the b-roll to the clips, and J made sure our other production materials were finished (our Production Log and Doc Outline) we were ready to export and submit our documentary. 

The full editing timeline.

After that, we eagerly awaited critique day in class and our final grade from our teacher. Click here to watch our full documentary (although we're going to re-edit based on some advice so we can submit this to festivals!)