JC Dávila's BLOG post #4: Discovering as I throw things to the timeline

            After having all of my footage logged and properly identified, to start throwing things in the timeline was a pleasure. This week I show to the rest of the class a 20-minute clip from my film. I roughly began to edit scenes together in order to achieve this and to my surprise I found that what I think could be a quick scene is something that is taking 5 to 7 minutes on the timeline (I have about 12 of those). This reassured me that I have a lot of footage and that I overshot indeed, which is not so positive, because it puts me to ponder that possibly my film is not well focused and has a lot of material floating around. Hopefully, this is not the case.

            Watching all the footage I got from each participant, made me contemplate that I have enough material to make a character-based documentary with one of my participants: Efraín Cortés. Is this something I want to do? Not at this moment. But, I am anxious to find out how much good-stuff I have of him altogether. Also, watching the footage made me think, that if I do this film with various protagonists, I might need to use three, one of them needs to go away… Who might that be?

            Regarding my Beauty Shots, I identified all of them also. I spread them out throughout bins, as for example: buildings, highway, airports, beach, university. Also, I divided them in geographical areas wherever the case is relevant. It was fun to see what do I have and also sad, because some shots, I could’ve done them way better. I started transcribing, but it’s still a long way to go. I also started to put markers on the things I’ve identified as relevant. As the transcriptions are made, markers to the interviews will also be added.

My post-production schedule has helped me have a clear idea of how to approach my project, I feel very comfortable with it. The way I will be working the rest of the quarter with my project is focusing each week on a different participant or social character. I believe this helps me to map out my content and work in a parallel form my interviews and scenes.