Selection and viewing of raw footage - Major Task

After we finally finished with all the filming for the documentary, we met up a few days later to see all the footage and start making some cuts. Rianna came to my home, and we started downloading the footage from the SD cards to my computer. After that, I opened a new project on Premiere Pro called Documentary 1. We decided to directly open the footage on Premiere Pro as it allows us to make highlights and cuts. This will later help ease our editing process. We started with Oana's Footage. We had 2 large 15-minute videos made with the secondary camera on the gimbal and other smaller close-up shots made with my Phone. I pressed play after putting the 2 large footage pieces next to each other and started making cuts to irrelevant footage. Then we got stuck midway with an expected problem, as the second part was video only, and the audio was on Rianna's phone. I quickly imported the recording and matched it to the video.

We planned to keep only footage that may make it into the final documentary. It took us about 50 minutes to go through it all and make initial cuts. After that, we were left with approximately 15 minutes of footage that had good potential of being included in the final project. Next, we went to Ovidiu's footage and did the same thing. Ovidiu's footage took us a bit longer at 70 minutes. This was because he talked about a lot of subjects, and it was really hard to pick useful information from there. We ended up again having approximately 15 minutes of good footage. We tried picking up footage that could easily connect with what Oana was talking about because we did not plan to do narration to create transitions between topics. After all this, we were left with 30 minutes of continuous footage. The next step was to go through it all again and connect the topics. Oana ended up with 8 minutes of footage about the University, Communities, Difficulties, Inspirations, the Outside art world, and, of course, an introduction. Ovidiu's content, being almost 7 minutes, consists of an introduction, Influencers, Cluj-Napoca, Conspiracy theories, Politics, and its connection to art. This was especially difficult to do because of the differences between them. Oana's footage was much more impactful on the subjects we wanted to cover. However, we need to keep in mind that the documentary is thought to be 55 minutes longer than what we are going to end up with. This means that we can focus only on a few subjects that, of course, are related to our goals and leave the rest to be seen.

In Ovidiu's part, it was important to sync the secondary camera footage with the main camera footage. It was pretty easy to sync, and from there on, I just did the same cuts as I did to the main one. In total, we were left with approximately 15 minutes of relevant footage that was left to be cut after doing the plot and story for the 5-minute documentary that we need to do.

Selection and cutting process