Rough Cut Presentation and Fine Tunings

Today we present our rough cut of "Greater Heights" to the FST 497 class. We nearly screened last week, but ran out of time. I have enjoyed the other rough cuts thus far and think everyone is doing a great job. I am excited to receive feedback, responses, and suggestions from everyone. I believe it will go smoothly and am looking forward to watching our cut on a screen instead of on a monitor. I think this puts you more in the perspective of the audience rather than the editor, which is a good thing sometimes.

In the last week, I have been trying to cut down what I can on the vox pop. As I have stated in previous posts, the vox pop feels a little too elongated and forced. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it leading the film; however, it is difficult to find another place to place it. Also, I have been trying to smooth the intro. After the vox pop, the film immediately jumps in to a short montage which includes our title, "Greater Heights." In my opinion, this intro montage is a little abrupt as well. It ensues without any preparation from the clips preceding. The end of the opening montage, however, is, I believe, effective. It fades out after the words "Greater Heights" and then fades in to some B-roll of Tori teaching a children's class. This is a very smooth transition into our first topic: Tori intro/benefits of parkour for children. The outro needs a little work too, in my opinion. It feels similarly abrupt. Immediately following Tori's last line, an outro montage ensues with music. This fades out and ends the film. I have been working on smoothing this as well. Whatever I do, I feel that both the outro and intro need to be consistent. They are already very similar as is, however, any changes I make to one I think I should make to the other. This is because they are serving similar purposes with similar techniques: one leads us into our story and the other leads us out.

I have decided not to readjust the topics until I have received feedback on our rough cut. I assembled them after completing all the topics and found that they actually flowed together quite nicely as they stood, with a few minor tweaks of course. In my opinion, the technique that Professor Silva suggested for us was quite effective. If you are editing a documentary and are struggling to find a story in the editing room, you should first watch all the interviews, break them into unifying topics, and then edit those topics individually without any concerns for repetitive B-roll. Then, after completing those topics, assemble them together and reevaluate your film. At that point, you may find an order and direction that you did not know was there.