Documentary - Transcript

On Monday we had a transcript workshop to get a better understanding of how to edit our interviews on paper. We were given a script, transcript and a premiere file, and asked to edit the interview on the file. 

I was quite negative in the beginning to the idea of transcribing all our long interviews which were 6 in total, and an average length of 30 min, but the workshop kind of opened my eyes to how useful transcribing them could be. We decided therefore to split the transcript between me, Simon and Gavin since George wasn’t done with syncing his part of the clips yet. 

By Wednesday all the interviews were transcripted and we had sat down underlining all the parts we wanted to have in the documentary. It was really nice working with the transcript as it was a lot easier to mark the places we wanted to use and make sure that everyone in the group was on the same point in the script. 

We then showed Helen our Sync assembly which was 25 minutes long. She suggested to not focus on the travelling and have it in blocks like we had done, - going from the start in England to Berlin and then finish in England. She suggested that we should swap around on the clips showing some bits of the Holocaust memorial quite early and have the survivors later in the doc. We also obviously have to shorten the sync assembly for our rough cut. 

We also told Helen that we’re having 2 people editing the project, Gavin and George, instead of only one person. She recommended having just one person editing the whole project to avoid confusion between two editors. I agree with her in a way, but are still thinking we’re best off having 2 people editing both because we have so limited time and to be able to share the amount of work between us better instead of having one person overworking himself with the edit and have another doing nothing.