Monday, May 9, 2011

May 9, 2011: Starting Up

Today was my first day editing my Proctor In China documentary.  I attended my E block class first thing this morning, then I arrived in the tech lab at 9:05 and began setting up and getting myself situated.  Jim was out today, but I received help from Anna when I needed it.  Tomorrow will be my last day testing out the setup for my "work station" down in the tech lab.  Today I just used my personal laptop to edit.  I learned how important it is to keep my clips organized when I download them during the filming process.  Fortunately I kept a log every day of the trip.  I logged what tapes I used, how many minutes were used, what we did that day, and when I put it into Final Cut Pro, I organized them into folders according to the day and the activity.  That made today a lot easier.  Thank you mom, dad, and Kristen for teaching me to think/plan ahead!  After taking about an hour or so to figure out how and which computers I could use to edit, I began to work.  I am editing everything in a very rough way right now.  I have about 25 minutes with a lot of empty space in between, and clips that don't flow together.  I edited a lot of our first day.  Tiananmen Square, and the Forbidden City are all that I worked on today.  I have previously worked on the Great Wall section, the Pre-Trip section, and the intro to the Hong Kong section.  My plan is to edit as much of each day, in order, as possible.  Hopefully by the end of the week I will have a rough cut of the entire film so I can begin to add the details that will make this film a quality one.  As a first day, I think today was fairly productive.  Tomorrow I will be in at 8:15 editing away.  I am happy with the footage I have to work with, and I can't wait to make it.  Just so everyone knows, my goal is to have this be a feature length film, I am expecting it to be just over an hour in length after everything is cut down.  Keep checking in to find out my progress!

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