Journal 10: The Making of the Movie

A few weeks back I created a timeline to edit all of my videos to the highlights in my dance career using the previous research I conducted when analyzing four videos with their tips to making the best documentary.

The past few weeks have been very successful to stay on track with editing and now I have clips I’d like to add into this documentary. Almost every day that I had to edit a video I got it done and accomplished what I aimed for. I predicted this would be one of the most challenging parts of editing the videos because of my busy schedule and need for good time management. This was still a little hard when times got busy, however this was not the biggest obstacle I had when editing. The challenge I encountered most while doing this portion was knowing what to keep/get rid of. Every dance video was on average 3 minutes long and there were 19 videos so there was about an hour of footage to edit. This was a hard process to go through each dance and find moves that I wanted to incorporate. While finding these moves I had to make sure I was not only using the more intricate movements but also different movements than any other clip I already previously used. Therefore both my time management and the trimming of dance videos created obstacles during the process of editing my documentary.

Firstly, I am so familiar with the videos I had a hard time deciding which parts of the dance I wanted to keep and which parts to discard. To decipher what to do I remembered the past technique I learned while researching examples on how to edit videos. The tip of editing your video in another view really helped this portion of the process. This made me put myself into the shoes of someone who had no or little dance experience. With this I added in the most exciting parts of each dance like turns, jumps and lifts to amaze the audience and keep them focused. By doing this my goal was to make someone who had originally no interest in dance intrigued by the activity when watching the videos. I believe this psychological tactic will better my overall result to having good reviews on my documentary. Another headache while editing was the actual skill of trimming the video. When dancing some moves do not have a specific beginning or end and blend with the next move to create the flow of the dance. To edit parts of each dance it was tricky to find the isolated moves so I would have a specific part to cut. To overcome this prioritized the importance of different moves and clips. Next I kept the longer edits for videos that were more important like my solo to show my development as a dancer. The clips that were not as specific to my overall objection for this project were then shortened and used as just extra detail to my short line.

Secondly, a challenge was trying to stay on top of editing videos every other day. If I did not stay with my timeline then I was at risk of not finishing my editing on time and thus prolonging other parts of my project if skipped a day. By not overcoming this obstacle I would have made all other parts of completing my documentary postponed creating less time to successfully edit the final project. This negative reinforcement of having to do double the next time if I skipped a day pushed me to do less work decided among an assortment of days and stick to where I should be. I psychologically knew that I would have a punishment if I did not complete what I scheduled to accomplish so this impacted the amount I got done in my time frame to succeed. Next I then categorized clips from my videos by genre of dance. I believe this will help with my organization in my video to make sure all genres were spread out evenly to create different visual pictures for the audience. With these categories it will be easy to find clips with a specific genre like tap or ballet when needed in an area of intricacy or calmness. Therefore I think this strategy will work to my benefit for well thought out visual pictures to the audience to get my journey across. Below is the clips I have for each category in the order of ballet dances, tap dances, jazz dances, hip hop dances, lyrical dances, solo dances:

The next steps for my project are to order these videos. My plan is to start with my younger ones to show how I grew up with the impact of dancing in the beginning. This will be able to touch on my younger years, the dancers I grew up with and how these beginning moments shaped my entire life. After that I plan to show my Myer Dance videos and make a sub-section of just my solo videos. The clips from the Myer Dance Team will show challeneged myself to a new atmosphere and teacher in my dance career. I feel that this sub-section will be extremely important to demonstrate not only the increase in my skill level but also my confidence. I will strive to show the moments of my first solo were I did moves with hesitance to my last solo when I owned the stage with courgae. I hope to be able to reflect on my developments psychologically and physically by comparing my solo videos. This will truly show why I love to dance and why it is my passion.