Documentary: Editing, Animation & Evaluation

We retitled our film to Down to Earth, as per George's suggestion.

One contributor, a cemetery groundskeeper, pointed us to Wildflower Turf, which was a useful resource for education about native wildflowers being used to increase biodiversity. I would like to draw or animate these flowers creatively to help illustrate the points in our documentary. https://www.wildflowerturf.co.uk/products/wildflower-turf/

This contributor also provided us with a seed specification list, which allowed me to find references images of these flowers and sketch them into a simple two-frame 'boiling line' animation. Here are the wildflowers I chose to draw based on an interview response:

Here are the animals I drew for some visual interest (they wiggled about on screen):

Here was my initial paper edit, as I took the role as primary editor for this project:

Esme added many specific logged file names to this afterwards for more direct reference.

OBS records as a recommended default in .mkv to ensure that the footage finishes recording in the event of a technical issue. .mkv is not supported by Premiere Pro so I used OBS's remux option to convert the .mkv screen recorded files to .mp4s.

I decided to do some creative framing using stills we captured & received from our contributors to hide some of the poor resolution that comes with screen recording Zoom interviews. To this end, I experimented with usng watercolour paper textures:

Interview review & marking timeline:

Cut dialogue timeline:

I then organised these clips into separate sequences according to the general thematic structure of our paper edit. Doing interview audio first allows the visual elements to follow a "script", giving a sense of structure to the edit. There was an excess of content, so I decided to divide the overall maximum (10 minutes/600 seconds) by the rough idea of 'chapters (7), giving me a loose jumping off points of 1 min 25 secs for each 'chapter'. This helped me massively - I now had restriction with direction, allowing me to better compare quality of dialogue to leave in or remove. I ended up cutting quite a bit of footage and removed some bits from our paper edit in order to fit the time limit.

It was difficult to find non-cliche-sounding non-copyright music, but I'm pleased with the ones I chose. Next time, I would add in some natural sound design to fit the animals featured such as birdsong, bat wing flaps, frog croaks, fox barks and badger chitters.

Work in progress, about 3/4 done:

I used Esme's colour palette as a reference for colour-grading on an adjustment layer. However, I ran out of time to go through this carefully, so next time I would allow an extra few hours to consider how meaning would best be created through adding cool or warm tones to the highlights or shadows, for example.

Final timeline:

In retrospect, I would have slightly changed my approach to completing my tasks, in that I would have either delegated more or managed my time better. While it may feel as though I had a certain level of control over the project, nothing could have been done without the shots my teammates got in the field and the material our contributors gave us. It has taught me a more natural and productive Premiere Pro workflow, as well as allowing me to exercise my frame animation skills, even if to an arbitrary extent. I feel most of our team communicated well, and keeping minutes from our meeting was quite useful in knowing our individual goals as well as our collective ones. I wish to work on the film a little more and bring it up to the standards I'd have were I more careful with my time - this will include a few more simple animations, more considered colour grading, adding wildlife sound effects to accentuate the viewer experience and maybe trying to clean up audio recorded through Zoom.

Had COVID not been a limiting factor, we would be able to record higher quality footage by travelling to the sites we depicted and sit with our interviewees in person. However, I feel that I utilised contributor material effectively in the edit to make the sequences more personal to the interviewee and what they are saying. My goal in the edit was to make it enganging, reflective and sweet (as loose guidelines), which I feel we achieved. I definitely have George to thank for the Google Earth screen-recorded footage, because it emulated high production value style drone shots that we wouldn't normally even consider!

Something else I found difficult and uncomfortable was actually talking to contributors. Talking cordially is very basic but speaking in depth with people unfamiliar to me, especially in asking for a massive favour such as starring in a documentary, made me incredibly nervous. I worried very often that it may seriously hinder our project as I was too awkward to coax interesting, meaningful responses from interviewees. I am very glad to have had Esme help me handle interviews when they came about. The initial contact was all done by me, which definitely increased my social courage for any similar future projects.

I'm pleased with how the film turned out, as it was a mammoth task to fgure out how to successfully cut up all that intevriew footage into something informative but at the same time poetic. I do wish that within the time alloted, I had gone over the film and fixed the things I've pointed out. My group helped with feedback on how to refine the rough cut before hand-in; the guitar track at one part was far too loud, which I hadn't realised until I watched it through with them. Additionally, I had mistakenly used the same graveyard panning shot twice to undercut voiceover interviews, which I replaced with the footage and recorded audio of church bells at St. Andrews, captured by Esme. This made the final edit more interesting.