I’m currently reading a book about making documentaries for one of my other classes which has been extremely helpful in working on my capstone (although I wish I had read it before starting). The book, which is called Documentary Storytelling has a section about going from raw footage to rough cuts to fine cuts to picture locks. Reading more about the process has been extremely helpful in knowing what’s to come and also has made me reflect upon what would have made this project easier. I think, in the future, given more time and perhaps more manpower, I will start working towards a rough cut through paper editing. Transcribing interviews, especially when I am working with so many, would be helpful in determining story structure. Rather than watching each clip over and over and trying to piece together cohesive bits of audio, I would simply cut and paste sections of the transcript into a readable outline of the story. Unfortunately, I think I may be too far into the process for this to be extremely useful but I think that I will try typing up the audio of my current edit and try reading it to see if it makes sense.
Hey Megan,
I know this sounds like a lame fix but if you can remember vaguely what each interview is about in essence, and can remember the hard beats from each take, you can scrub through your footage to gather a couple soundbytes that best represent the interview and use those to narrow down and better define your story..
Transcribing an 11 minute phone interview took me an hour to make sure that I correctly got it all and notice all the various “uhhs” and “uhmms.” If you have the time, I’d say, yea go for it, but if you don’t have time and need a shortcut to finding your story, think of this building-block method as clip-skimming.
Hope that helps!