Journal 8: Embracing Editing Skills

This week I began to not only collect picture but also videos for my documentary. This will assist me when creating my second portfolio piece. As I searched for these videos I was able to travel in time from my younger dance days to videos as recent as last year. However when collecting them I realized just how many videos I really had. I knew for my documentary I couldn’t include all of these so I decided to research techniques to channeling through the highlights that should be used to make it most effective.

Below there are videos that I found used specific techniques that will help me when creating my own documentary:

---

---

Gained Knowledge from the Links: Video #1:

http://youtu.be/rX0sK0X5Io0 In the first video, it featured a male named Chad Halverson who is an editor at Flipelevn's videos. Here he shares his top 5 tips of editing. The tip that stood out to me the most was about the pacing and tempo of the video. He makes a metaphor to the pace of a movie to a song. He says that if the lyrics go to fast then you don't understand what they are saying just like in a video the message needs to be clearly understood by the audience for it to correlate with the visual component. I feel like this tip is very helpful for me when creating my voiceovers because I need to make sure all my sentences are clearly heard so the audience can hear about my successes, challenges and overall journey as a dancer.

Video #2:

http://youtu.be/FinhQb3jiAs

Next in this video it is about the post production of creating the movie and making sure that the editor is taking in the consideration of the psychological components of the mind when the audience is viewing their video. An interesting part of this video was the analysis on how different pictures you put and the length of time they are on the screen can send a different message to the viewers mind. For example they conducted many experiments like that a still shot can be effective to show an intense moment if kept for the appropriate length to let the audience feel emotion. However if it is too long then it could make the viewer bored and loose the effect. Therefore this video showed me the importance of time on a picture and how different techniques like a still shot or moving shot will be appropriate to showing different emotions at different times. Video #3: http://youtu.be/LtIJFyYEOo0

Here in the third video, the narrator uses an example of 2014 Oscar nominee "The Invisible War" to show some editing techniques used in this documentary about the military troops. Advice that interested me was how to intensify your voice in these voice overs to make the overall mood more dramatic and portray a message. I can use this in my own documentary by making my voice higher and more upbeat during the triumphs of my dance career to show my love toward dancing. I can also use a more middle tone when describing the obstacles i faced so the audience understands how these challenges affected me and my dance career. Video #4:

http://youtu.be/v1yJ2n6-U84

The clips in the fourth video were essential to managing my editing of my clips in iMovie. This video was important since it used the same program I am using for my own documentary so I could make direct connections to my editing process. A skill that I learned was how to import videos from online into iMovie and be able to cut them to use in my documentary. This could be helpful to showing other clips from dancers interviews like me to make a self to world connection on the challenges of others in the dance world. Also having the steps to be able to edit these clip will make it easier for me to create my movie in the most timely manner and be effective while working.

---

The successes that I have experienced were that professionals were able to help me trim these videos to specific areas that showed most skill or improvements. With this it will help me to have the full potential to create the best documentary I possibly can to get my overall objective across to show my passion of dance. Something interesting that I gained from all of the videos was the technique to edit the documentary in the perspective of someone who didn’t have much knowledge to dance. I found this to be a specific task that would make me think with every aspect of the documentary I create in someone else's perspective. This will make me only pick the most exhilarating moments to keep the engagement of any kind of audience and allow them to enjoy my documentary even if they aren't a dancer. This is crucial since people like my classmates and Mr. Kent may not be directly involved with the dance world and not have much background knowledge on it. Having these people as my target audience makes this skill set of perspective significant when editing my documentary.

A challenge I have now encountered is not having a timeline to successfully sort through all these videos and the parts I wish to include. To be organized in this step of the journey to making a documentary I created a timeline of when I would edit each video to get things accomplished: