Real People | Real Stories

Whoo, wee. I am tired. We’ve basically got all our shooting done, and all the key material is logged and backed up. Transcriber is working on the last couple files, and we have been feverishly evolving an editing and subtitling protocol.

As far as we can tell, it’s working. We’re staring down several long days of hard, hard work, but when we leave here (touch a bit of wood) we should have something we’ve never had before: a puzzle in which the sizes and shapes of the pieces are already defined before we sit down to Final Cut it.

Room service.

Tea. Biscuits.

Beer.

Little boxes of “Real” (brand) mango nectar.

Many trips up and down the stairs carrying papers and notebooks…

It’s feeling a little like finals week at the dorms.

Amy and Nutan are hammering out a great system for getting each subtitle screen to correspond to a discrete clip (which also somewhat miraculously says what’s written there). I’m here to tell you, next time you watch a subtitled film, don’t misunderestimate the effort that goes into it.

That said, it’s also a very rewarding process, in that we get to spend some real time with the best bits of the film we’ve shot. Sense how they feel and sound. And look. Same with looking at complete transcripts–We keep this stuff swirling in our heads in a way you don’t do if you just shoot a tape, and then put it in the stack like we used to do.

(Good thing I took the trouble to go to journalism school. Not like they didn’t tell me that there about three times a week for two years. Ah, well…sometimes you gotta learn a thing a few different ways.)