Editing is the Heart of Film Making

I've started the process of editing, and looking back at that interview with Tania makes me a bit uncomfortable. She obviously hasn't done a terrible amount of interviews and she is very hesitant. This is going to be a challenge to edit. She takes a great deal of pauses and makes a few retractions.

Of course I had to complicate things and accidentally tape over a mid-point section in the interview. She talks very quietly so I had gone back to listen to it, to make sure I could pick up her voice. She wanted to add something to the interview and so she just started talking randomly. Knee jerk reaction was to press record. Tapes are, I'm sorry to say, a bit of a foreign object to me, and I obviously have no ingrained concept of how they work. I had gotten kind of used to the nice Edirol recorder, which just makes new files each time you start it. Was that what I was expecting? Perhaps. It is a sloppy mistake and somewhat worrying. I lost a three minute section of the original interview, and taped over a bit I found interesting, which is a crying shame. Elizabeth's interview was much more composed and coherent, in retrospect. I was also much better prepared and far less flustered in that interview. I think the lesson here is to stay calm and try to think about what you're doing before you do it. Its been a trying week, to be sure.

I haven't decided how exactly I'm going to edit this smoothly. Her speech has very many long, contemplative pauses, sometimes within sentences. I can't cut out these pauses without jump cuts, because the sections around the pauses are too short, if I did a fade between the sections it would just look very strange. It would certainly take away from her words. I guess the easiest thing to do would be to go around and take more stock footage to paste over the more awkward of the transitions. I don't have a terribly clear idea of what I would use for the stock footage. I've really done the emergency light thing already. Maybe I could sort of continue this, but I feel there should be more to it....

I'll have to contemplate this for awhile.