This section describes the step-by-step process you should follow through the Organizing, Analysis, & Editing (OAE) workshop and the corresponding assignments. Please read through this page thoroughly to understand the entire process before beginning.
From Loglist to Select Reels
During the week of 15-19 March, students should transition to full-time work on organizing and logging all their data. Your loglist should aim for a comprehensive overview of your data with corresponding details about metadata and paradata. This loglist should be elaborated as much as possible before beginning the OAE workshop. This loglist will provide you a powerful textual tool to organize and access details about your materials.
During this transition week, you should ideally watch all your footage. The steps that follow assume that you do review it all, but as outlined in the Loglist Pre-selection page it may be easier to work initially with a 10-hour selection. This pre-selection should feature your most significant materials, while also providing a good sense of the variety of content.
Next to the loglist, you should now be working to create an audiovisual file structure that gives you another more direct access point. The foundation of this tool will be creating “select reels” inside your editing application. This is a process quite common among documentary filmmakers and is expertly described in Jacob Bricca’s Documentary Editing: Principles & Practice.
Terminology in Transition
Note that this is the first year that we are using this terminology, so in the video tutorials you will find that we are using different terminology. While the terms are different, the method is essentially the same. Making select reels is a systematic approach to finding patterns in your data that resonates with a process in visual ethnography we call making “sequences,” which we distinguish from edited “scenes.” We have found that the use of these terms proves confusing, because they are often used outside of visual ethnography to mean other things. We flag this here so you are aware of the disparity, but in class we will try to consistently use “selects” instead of “sequences” to mean a group of shots unified in space and time with respect to the profilmic reality. This is distinguished from a “scene,” which indicates a group of shots unified in space and time with respect to the structure of the film. The basic distinction is between a record that resembles the process of recording done in the field and the way these records are (re)arranged to become a final output. In this phase, it is most important to have a closer relationship to what you’ve done in the field than to what your final outcome will be. Some of you have already been editing materials for your field reports, however, it is premature to modify your materials like this.
Step-by-step: First know what you have
As you begin watching through your footage, be open and generous with your materials. Try to do this without assumptions about what you think is there, rather instead try looking anew at the material in order to perceive it with fresh eyes. We encourage students to not discard materials that at first sight might seem useless (for instance because they are out of focus), because they might later on in the process come in handy in other ways (for instance by just using the sound).
During the OAE workshop, we will ask you to share sequences of minimally edited footage (“selects”) that adhere as much as possible to the way they were recorded (i.e., without changes in chronology). You will first create “source-based select reels,” which we abbreviate as SOURCE REELS, and then more refined “topic-based select reels,” or TOPIC REELS. Only after working through your materials to make these reels will you begin to edit scenes. These steps are integral to our process of analysis.
This process is optimized for video-based projects, but if your project emphasizes other formats, then a similar process should be applied to selecting audio reels, photo compilations, drawing samples, etc.
Step 1: Creating Source Reels
Before anything else, create a new Project in Adobe Premiere (or your preferred editing app). You will work in this same project through the entire process of editing your film. Once this project has been made, import the folders with your files from which you have organized your footage per day and/or event during your ongoing process of saving and logging your materials. As you go along, you will add content (AV files), folders (bins), and timelines (sequences) into this one project. Do not create a new project for every assignment as you want all your materials and versions together. The project file itself is relatively small, so back it up consistently to a secure place separate from your computer. Each day you work on it, you may want to create a new version and name it with the current date. Then you will have a growing backup of versions you’ve done day by day and if necessary can recover an earlier version quite efficiently. But always work from the most recent one and be consistent.
Now that your project is set up, you should begin to make SOURCE REELS that collect all the material you have shot from the same source, in other words at a given event, specific interview, location scouting, or, perhaps, collected as archival footage. This may be one continuous and uninterrupted shot, say of an interview, or it may consist of dozens of clips made during a particular activity. Depending on the particular shoot, you may end up dumping a few hours onto the timeline. This is ok. Resist the urge to start deleting materials.
To do this, create a new Sequence in Premiere and put all the material from the same source on the first track (V1). Name the sequence according to the source content. This is your first SOURCE REEL. Continue through all your material until you have plotted it all on different timelines. In your Project Panel you will now have many SOURCE REELS that give you a comprehensive overview of all your shoots, interviews, archival materials, etc. As you name your reels, you should reproduce this same naming convention in your loglist and note which clips you’ve added to which reels.
Ideally, this step should be completed before beginning the OAE workshop. Minimally, you have completed this process with all the material included in your 10-hour pre-selection.
Step 2: Organizing Source Reels
Now begin to watch each SOURCE REEL. As you watch through the materials on your timeline begin to separate them into content sections or chunks based on certain actions, topics of conversation, or specific categories. At the beginning of each of these sections add a title card and add a short descriptive title in big block letters. Beneath this section title write a short succinct description so you can quickly identify the content of each section as you move through them later. Lastly, you can give the section a rating at the bottom to indicate a qualitative assessment (e.g., based on 3 stars or based on your own system).
For example, based on a project Mark did in Ethiopia, he creates a SOURCE REEL called Yacob’s morning commute, an event with one of his main protagonists. This shoot begins at Yacob’s home as his wife serves breakfast to the family and the kids are sent off to school. After finishing his coffee, Yacob gathers his things and sets off to town. Based on the main theme discussed, Mark describes a particular section of a walking interview he made with Yacob like this:
YACOB WALKS TO TOWN
Ethiopia is a land rich in culture,
but it needs development
**
Mark knows instantly who is involved, what activity is happening, what topic Yacob is addressing, and that the clip has two out of three stars.
After a content section, make a blank space on the timeline to separate it from the next section so it can be easily differentiated when moving across the timeline. Note that nothing has been deleted and all sections in this SOURCE REEL are on the same timeline.
At this point, you should start having quite a few SOURCE REELS (Premiere sequences). If you haven’t already, now is a good time to start creating a higher level folder structure to keep your Media Browser area from getting cluttered. To do this create a bin for Source Reels, another for Topic Reels (discussed in the next step), another for Camera Footage, etc.
Following the guidelines in steps 1 & 2, will enable you to complete the corresponding REEL Assignments.
REEL1: 30-minute organized source reel compilation + Metacommentary ➙
REEL2: 30-minute organized source reel compilation + Metacommentary ➙
Step 3: Creating Topic Reels
Next, you will now work with these SOURCE REELS to begin a categorization process to create TOPIC REELS. Your aim here is to quickly skim through content sections with the aim of getting a sense of its main topic. As you identify a topic, create a new timeline sequence in Premiere and give it a corresponding name.
Thus, Mark might begin a new TOPIC REEL named Development and he would copy the section called Yacob Walks to Market to this new reel. As he continues through the other SOURCE REELS, he would copy-paste other sections related to development and add them to the corresponding TOPIC REEL.
In this process, you are searching your body of material for patterns. These may be discursive concepts like in Mark’s example, but they may also be more abstract qualities like recurring emotional moments, a sense of drama, etc. This process also should give you a sense of the rhythms in your footage. You should also be noting the strengths and weaknesses of the different sections. This recognition of patterns is key to the analytic process. As Jacob Bricca says, “One of the main activities of the documentary editor, then, is observing a pattern and making use of it.”
In this case, Mark has recognized that “development” is a recurring issue so he has begun to notice a pattern. This example is based on a content section with an informal interview. Other expository sections may depict the telling of significant stories, oral histories and biographies, public speeches, or consist of dialogue-driven interactions. Topic reels or their constituent sections need not be based on interview topics, but may consist of recurring expressions of a certain emotion, the pattern of behavior in different moments, or even simply an observational (verité) moment that strikes you as compelling. They may also refer to moments of methodological reflexivity, collections of material culture, or symbolic motifs.
At this stage, it is not necessary to know how this topic will be used in your final output or even certain if it will. And note that you never delete a reel, but simply begin to copy materials into new and more refined reels, so you can always go back to the SOURCE REELS to reconsider the content sections.
Step 4: Refining Topic Reels
After completing this process, the next step is to begin watching through all your TOPIC REELS to look for patterns within these reels. This can be a challenging experience as the assortment of sections may not feel very coherent despite belonging to a common topic. As such, you must have patience to (re)watch these multiple times until you begin to notice more nuanced patterns begin to emerge. In the process, you will begin to refine your selects in four ways.
- You should think about improving the descriptions you’ve made in the title cards. In this process, you may realize that some sections have been miscategorized and you may move them to another topic-based select reel.
- As you begin to identify the stronger material, this can be raised to the second track (V2), so it more easily stands out.
- Begin to cut off the weaker materials and move these to the end of the timeline in a new section with a title card called “excess” or “no good” or such. As these accumulate, you may want to create a separate reel (Premiere sequence) called ‘The Parking Lot’ or such where you copy all these into one place.
- Lastly, you may begin to reorder the sections if this helps give greater coherence, since you probably just dumped these in as you went along. It is nevertheless advisable to keep gaps between sections as you have not begun to refine the sections into scenes.
Following the guidelines in steps 3 & 4, will enable you to complete the corresponding REEL Assignments.
REEL3: 10-minute refined topic reel + Metacommentary ➙
REEL4: 10-minute refined topic reel + Metacommentary ➙
Step 5: Working Toward Structure
As you go along, you can begin to create new folders (bins) based on characters, locations, and/or broader themes, which will help to identify the larger structures to your final output. Copy related topic reels into these folders to help organize your topics into more overarching categories. You may also want to create a folder where you begin to copy your favorite scenes that are simply based on intuition.
Remember to keep these folder and sequence structures documented in your loglist as your ability to cross-reference the two organizational tools will make your ability to find specific items and overarching patterns more powerful.
In this process you may want to begin to distinguish between key content sections (depicting significant events, characteristic activities, important interactions, etc.) and relational content sections (adds context, nuance, or further familiarity with particular subject, plot, issue) in order to start thinking about the relationship between sections.
Bricca says that you will want to also begin to reflect on the strengths of the material. This is, of course, related to the technical and aesthetic strengths, but perhaps more importantly it refers to the combination of conceptual and analytical as well as narrative and rhetorical strengths.
Step 6: Cutting Scenes
At this point, you are ready to begin cutting scenes. You still won’t know for certain how the overall piece will come together, which will obscure your ability to know for certain how scenes should be arranged (internally and externally). So Bricca suggests you begin with what you know. That is, begin with the material in which you are most confident.
More will be covered in the Thesis Seminar about building scenes.