common ground

/kəˈmjuːnɪti/

I absolutely love editing. Using Premiere Pro and After Effects is my favourite past time. After all of the footage was together, Emily went through it and selected the best shots to create the first draft. It went from twenty three minutes to seven, and from then on it fluctuated between five to eight minutes.

I used After Effects to animate some of the questions used for the interviews, as well as some other bits and pieces. 

At the same time I also used my Zoom mic to record two short speeches and colour-graded the clips one by one on Premiere Pro. It involved a slight increase in contrast and playing around with the temperature through intertwining other colours.

On Thursday evening I swapped with Emily and took her hard drive to spend the night editing. It actually took longer than expected for me to look through the footage again. The main problem we had was that the documentary was very visual at the start but then faded away into a more interview based ending. To attempt to fix this I cut it up slightly more, mixing it up with some of the shots we had filmed around town and within Farnham Park, although that won't make the final cut because we've decided to change it for more News footage.

The main editing I did was in the middle part where it focuses on what community means to different people. The storyboard started off as family, then going into religion, university etc. I changed this to be family and then go into music, fading away the sound afterwards to go into the speech about how community is more of a feeling. After the music shots, it was followed by the visuals I filmed (the seaside town being my newest community) and then changing into the next community, all connected through the audio track.

I enjoyed the short period of editing more than being the director of photography, and I do wish I could've animated a shot or two, as it was something I had been wishing to do since the very first idea I had back in October, but I'm glad I got to do some things on After Effects. I also enjoyed having the chance to put my opinion in the film as well through the audio.

The draft:

I think community's more of a feeling than anything else. You can't really describe it. Someone anonymous told us for them it's religion and their church. For other peers it's our creative university and the people they meet along the way. And who's to say it has to be physical? Poets are connected through poetry, perhaps they're not acquainted yet they're aware through words. And back when we were young, just children, weren't we all a part of a community as well? The playground was all ours. So.. that's what a community is.