Editing with stuff you didn’t shoot

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Editing with stuff you didn’t shoot

This week’s assignment was interesting because the video we created had to be edited entirely from footage we did not shoot. That means no prior knowledge of what was included in the footage, no idea of where the good shots were, and no transcriptions of any audio that might be important. We were working blind, laboriously going through every minute of the footage to find clips that worked in our story.

This wasn’t too, too difficult because, fortunately, I didn’t have that much footage to go through. All of the videos I used were no more than nine or ten minutes in length. I can imagine how hard this process would be if I had to scour hours upon hours of footage instead. Thank God that wasn’t the case.

I started by just watching tons of videos in the archives we were allowed to use, looking for any possible themes I could craft into a story. I eventually landed on a video called Modern New Orleans, a video from the early 1930’s about the futuristic technology (for the time) and strength of the city’s infrastructure. A certain text slide caught my eye, referencing the fact that, at the time, the levees keeping New Orleans from becoming a lake had not failed in over 100 years. That’s when the idea came to me: I would do a mini-documentary on Hurricane Katrina using only footage from before 1950.

This proved to be easier than I expected. I was able to find footage of floods and hurricanes in Pittsburgh, Reno, New England and other places to use as b-roll over a nice voice over talking about the destructive forces of hurricanes and the great task of rebuilding afterward. I spliced the images and audio together to create what appears to be a single hurricane. Hopefully you agree.

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ADR Exercise

This week we had do experiment with ADR, or Automated Dialogue Replacement. We were to take a scene from a movie we liked (for us, it was my favorite movie of all time, Gladiator), and recreate EVERY bit of audio in the scene. We couldn’t use any stock sound effects, either, we had to recreate everything ourselves. For us, that meant a HUGE degree of difficulty. We had a fight scene, so we needed to recreate grunting, panting, swordfighting, punching and kicking. You should’ve heard us down in the editing bays, grunting and growling and shouting; it was definitely awkward.

But while the awkwardness of recording grunt noises was probably the most difficult part of the exercise, the part that demanded the most of our creativity was creating a slicing/stabbing noise. We obviously couldn’t actually stab or slice something with a sword, so instead we used a key to cut and tear through a piece of paper. The sound wasn’t quite perfect, but it definitely got the job done. A close second was the swordfighting itself, simply because we don’t own swords. We used two metal bars we found through numberous phone calls to friends and tried banging them together, but the sound was too muffled. In the end, we had to balance the bars upright on the ground and throw them together, allowing more of a vibration.

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