film a documentary

How I did it: It was a short documentary about the making of our movie, ROULETTE, which I am producing and my husband is directing. We've been doing "Video Diaries" which various members of the crew have been shooting and editing, to show what life is like on the set of a low-budget film - the different challenges and successes, and how you overcome whatever obstacles your lack of money and time may throw at you, to end up with a beautiful finished project.

I'd shot on the video camera before (a Sony HC1 HD camera), but I'd never edited before. I learned a LOT, some my husband taught me, and some I learned by trial and error, and looking stuff up online. I'm very proud of what I came up with - a few shots/edits in particular, especially one where I added a dissolve effect to go from a shot of the action to a view in the camera's LCD to show what was actually being filmed. I'm sure I'll do better on the next one, but I am very happy with my maiden voyage.

You can see it at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu4GjhRA0Rs

More info on our film, ROULETTE, can be found at www.myspace.com/roulettemovie, and on IMDB.

Lessons & tips: YouTube has a lot of instructional videos for using Final Cut Pro, which is what I edited on. They helped me learn to resize my clips and move things around in the frame. A friend who knows the program is the best help, however.

For the actual telling of a story in a documentary, it is helpful to get as many interviews as possible - people describing who they are, what is going on, where you are, why things are being done, etc. This helps to provide a framework for all the B-roll and other clips, so that it all makes sense and tells a story.

Next time I want to try to add some music. I felt that it was a little too much to do the first time around, and I needed to concentrate on learning to edit video and in-video audio.

Resources: I love my camera - the Sony HC1. They don't make it anymore, but it is one of the nicest HDV consumer cameras out there. The YouTube video (lack of) quality does not do it any justice.

Final Cut Pro is great, but EXTREMELY complex. There are so many things that you can do, it takes a long time to learn them all.

My husband helped me a lot with the basics of editing, and I had a friend who helped me to upload it to the 'net, which I'd never done.

Nov 04, 2008, 06:20PM PST | 1 comment | 2 cheers