Since the first class back from the Azores on March 25th, we have been working hard at finding the sound bite gems we need to tell the story. Then, we cut away the fat, aka the unnecessary parts of sound bites. The Act 1 team, Leanna Ward, Nicole Speziale, Anastasia Bordone, and Liz Kaufer, have pieced together the story uniquely. Each editing team works with members of the story team. Act 1 has worked with story team members Jackson Blackburn and Sam Buturla.
Act 1 is all about the cultural impact of music, the history of the Viola da Terra, and an introduction to the Azores. We split Act 1 into five sections: Music is Universal, Beauty of the Island, Tradition, Culture, and Story of the Vola da Terra.
First, we laid down the A-roll, aka all the interviews. We used a big Google document, where we each pieced together sound bites we thought told the first part of the story. We added many interviewees, some repeating themselves so we could have options.
Since we filmed many interviewees in Portuguese, translating sound bites can take up a lot of brain energy. Since no one working on Act 1 speaks Portuguese, we have been using online translators and referring to our classmate Carolina Caputo Noguiera, who speaks Portuguese.
We selected sound bites from interviews, choosing whoever said it best. We edit on Adobe Premiere and use Google Docs for documents. In addition to this, Act 1 opted to use Whimsical, which allowed us to organize where each sound bite goes visually. As you can see, there are so many colors, and it looks a little confusing, but we edit as we go despite planning.
During our second class, we watched Act 1 with the whole class. We then made an appointment to edit Act 1 with Dr. Luskay. Our main issue was that we had added too many clips that repeated themselves, so the story was not there yet. Along with that, we discovered that many sound bites sounded better in other places after rewatching.
We met with Dr. Luskay and Professor Guarneri on Thursday, when we watched all of Act 1 once again. From there, we moved clips into Sibera, aka the end of the timeline. We say, “Move it to Sibera,” when we move clips to the far right of the timeline to either delete them or come back to them after completing a rough edit. We then connected each clip to one another; for example, if someone discussed culture, we’d find another clip discussing culture and tradition, and then we’d find some discussing tradition, and so on.
We color-coded everything on the timeline. This is our rulebook: Color coding: Magenta is music, Dark blue is video, Yellow is to remind us to go back to the clip, Mango is sound effects, and Orange is captioning.
Finding specifics isn’t easy; that’s why it’s important to have multiple people on the edit. Missing key sound bites is inevitable, and we could end up finding them a week after editing or a month after. We also had to fight briefly with translations again, as an interview we wanted to use had not yet been translated!
After locking in a rough draft of the sound bites and cutting down our runtime from 13 to 8 minutes, the group dipped into adding B-roll. In this stage of editing, we are matching each section with the appropriate B-roll. For example, if the sound bites are talking about the islands, we will add B-roll shots of the beauty of the island.
We have all officially scratched the surface of the editing process. However, there is still much to do, like sound, lower thirds, and color. Stay tuned for more about editing Acts 2 and 3.