Making Your Rough Cut

Your Rough Cut
Due date: Friday, April 16

Now that it is April, it is time for us to transition from filming our interviews to editing our footage. The first and most crucial step in this process is for you to spend a lot of time looking at your interviews and cutting and arranging your footage into a logical and easily-followed story that is of five to seven minutes in length.

The technology that we use is not all that sophisticated. We will be using Apple's iMovie, which is a simple program that I will be showing you how to use in class.

The REAL challenge here is

1.) Deciding which topical thread(s) you will follow in your interview(s)
2.) Identifying and cutting usable sections of your interview(s) into a logical and compact narrative.

Don't worry about transitions, still images, text, or special effects right now. What we HEAR in the rough cut is far more important than what we SEE. Though we are using video software, we are working primarily on the audio track of your documentary. Text, images, etc, go in AFTER we have a working rough cut that tells us a story!

Look at the example of Sam and Devon's interview at the Hare Krishna temple. Please watch this short three-minute unedited segment. Then play the 1:20 length edited cut. The editing choices that you make will be different, so I produce this example only to show the sorts of cuts you might make. Pay attention to your ability to put things in different sequence than they occurred during the interview!

Unedited Video - Student sample from Justin Nystrom on Vimeo.

And the edited version:

Edited video - student sample from Justin Nystrom on Vimeo.

And finally, I threw in a few transitions in one more version. Note that this video moves too quickly. Pauses in the narration where one might show images, etc, would definitely work. We'll look at all these things in the coming month!

Student Sample - with transitions from Justin Nystrom on Vimeo.