As soon as I got home from all the filming, I grabbed my laptop and went through all the footage. I first watched all of the interviews, to make sure none of the audio ever peaked or even the camera went blurry. After making sure everything was good with that, I then moved on to reviewing the b-roll. I wasn’t looking to delete any B-roll other than if it was shaking or blurry. Thankfully, not much was, leaving me with a lot of b-roll to work with later.
The whole editing process was done using the software Adobe Premiere Pro. I was the editor for the whole documentary. Once I create the project, I always start by organizing all of my content. I created 3 bins: interviews, audio, and graphics. I then imported everything into each bin.
Beginning the editing process, I dragged all the interviews into the timeline and synced both angles with each audio. This made things a lot easier once I continued. Then, I created a rough line edit. We had created an outline of how we wanted the documentary to flow during pre-production, so I used that as my guide when making it. This was important since we decided that the only audio guiding our documentary would be from our interviews.
We started off with our main interview with Susana. I had to cut down a lot of the interview, as it was 22 minutes full of content, making sure to put the most informational and important responses. After, I placed a small portion of our interview with Diana. This was done purposely as our main focus was Susana, so we wanted to keep the focus on her, but Diana’s interview was a nice transition and gave versatility in perspectives. Finally, we ended with Susana’s sit-down section, first having her go through the photo books and then ending the pieces with some final statements from her.
Once the line edit was made, I then moved on to placing the B-roll and the music under the audio. I went through the sequence, placing the specific b-roll filmed where it was mentioned by Susana in the interviews. Then, I moved on to placing the remainder of the b-roll over any jump cuts or empty spaces. There was also a specific staged b-roll placed during the transition periods from the three main parts. It was actually harder than expected to find music that matched the preferred tone we wanted for our documentary, as we didn’t want it to be sad but it also wasn’t supposed to be super happy. We needed something that was neutral, which is very hard to find on Youtube. I asked for Nati’s help with searching for the music and together we were able to find a lot of good potential music. We narrowed it down to 3 tracks, as each one was used under each different section in the documentary.
After everything was placed, I moved on to transcribing the interview audio and translating it into captions. Since we conducted the interviews in Spanish to adapt to Susana, we decided having English subtitles over the interviews would be a good thing to add for all viewers to understand what she was saying. Adobe has a feature to transcribe audio to make it into perfectly timed captions. However, I realized once I used it that it did not translate the transcriptions for you. So, I transcribed all the audio, exported the transcript file, translated all the text from Spanish to English, and then imported the newly translated transcriptions. Once the correct transcriptions were imported, I was able to use Adobe again to create all the captions. This was the most challenging part I experienced when editing as I didn’t realize what a long, elaborate process it would be. I also do not speak Spanish, so I was constantly in communication with Nati to make sure the captions produced were accurate.
Finally, after adding all my constant powers over the audio cuts, having my group members watch/review it, and rendering everything, it was finally time to export the final product. The whole editing process took me about 5 days to complete and the final documentary came out to be around 7 ½ minutes, a few minutes longer than I anticipated.
Here is a link to the final product my group and I produced, we are very proud of how everything came out. The documentary is titled Encontrando un Futuro, translated as finding a future. We felt as though this fits perfectly with the purpose of our piece, as Susana’s long journey helped her find her future here in America, which she values deeply.
Hope you enjoy it! - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qcmQisGhNO7O6yp-FYmChLRVdODiHGH7/view?usp=drivesdk
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