PRODUCTION: ORGANISING THE FOOTAGE

All shoots are done, all the footage has been filmed and now my role changes from Director of Photography to Editor. Prior to going into the edit stage, from my research so far one of the main things I've found I need to do before assembiling my edit is the footage needs to be organised. While researching online and finding an article by Mark Heidelberger, the beginning of an edit involves choosing the software which I've done by choosing Adobe Creative Cloud. Mark then goes on to say:

"Much of the job will include inputting footage into your editing system and organising it in such a way that you can find and access it quickly. This is particularly important with documentaries since there are often large amounts of footage to deal with, no script to work from, and few (if any) slates to demarcate the heads and tails of shots. The footage is usually provided to you by the producer or director on a hard drive. Upon connecting the hard drive to your system, you can begin the process of logging the footage, which consists of watching and labeling it according to the content. Editors of scripted films can use the scene number or slug line for logging; but documentary editors must come up with a description of the scene." - Mark Heidelberger 

Since I've been the one shooting all the footage for the documentary, after every shoot I logged the footage onto 2 separate hard drives (one as a main and another as a back-up) and began organising them into folders ready for the logging.

As we were still shooting while I made these files I organised them by days, in each file I organised the footage by cameras as this was easier for me to remember. As you can see from the Blackburn file, here were have 4 cameras (Canon DSLR is behind the scenes photos) as all of these were filmed in different formats as well. But this helped me begin the organising.

The Canon C100 footage all comes into a ACVHD File which I need to open through a logging software such as Adobe Prelude to play it back. But I also needed to rename and organise the footage more anyway so I decided to do all of this through Prelude.
When bringing it all into Prelude, because I'd already organised the folders on my hard drive, I had all the footage organised, I just needed them organised a bit more. By this I mean I wanted the interviews in a separate folder to the actuality footage so I could easily go and grab them when I needed them.

Once I'd organised the footage into folders and separated the interviews and other footage to make it easier to find, I went through all the clips, watched them and renamed them as well. As you can see from the screenshot above I named them with the type of shot and what was going on in the shot as well. I did this for every clip and made it simple:

W.S = Wide shot
M.S = Mid shot
C.U = Close up
E.C.U = Extreme close up
(P.F) = Pull focus
(Pan) = Panning shot
(Tracking) = moving shot with the shoulder mount

What Prelude also allows me to do is add comments onto the clips which I used a lot for footage which would either require extra grading (vlog footage) or the performance videos where I could note where the shots start and end rather than having to watch through the entire video to find what I need. This was really helpful with clips such as Tanya's wedding mix at the Blackburn performance. Here the performance starts slow with her in a wedding dress and then later it changes and she rips it off and goes into a much more lively performance:

So the key points of this performance were the mood change and also when Tanya smashes the wedding cake, so I was able to note where these sections took place which would stay in when I send the footage over to Premiere. Already I'm making the edit easier for me by making the footage much easier to find and cut by organising it all like this.