Episode Three: 35 - Placeholder Screens

Knowing that I couldn't quite memorize everything that I was working with, another way around this editing problem was to merely envision what sort of shots would go with some dialogue. So, I would just listen to the final interview edit, and close my eyes to envision what kind of image would go with the words he spoke. Then I would stop the interview, and layer on top of the interview a plate with words describing what I wanted to see while he said something.

If Toshi was talking about wanting to make other people's dreams come true, I knew that I wanted to include some kind of animation with his Dream Maker Logo, and I would put as a placeholder a plate that said "Toshi Logo Animation"; if he was talking about teaching kids, I would put as a placeholder a plate that said "Toshi teaching kids." At this point of the process, it seemed like this was a nice way to try to time what I needed, too; so I would see how the plate felt at 2 seconds, or four seconds, then when I found the footage that I would use, I knew exactly where it would go, and how long it would last.

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Episode Three: 34 - Examining Archive Footage, ii

One thing about going through all this archive footage was that I had to really get all of this footage into my memory, so that as I was going through the interviews, I would be able to recall something like, "Oh yeah, that shot with Toshi speaking to the kids at the school, that would go nicely here!"

The other way that I dealt with all this archive footage is to also ingrain into my mind all of the final interview footage, and the story as far as I had it. Then as I was going through archive footage, I would say to myself something like, "Oh yeah, this shot with Toshi dancing in the street, this would go great at that part when he's talking about always practicing."

So really, in working with all this footage, I had to memorize both the story and interview content that I had finalized, and also all of the archive and other secondary footage from my own library. Unfortunately, my memory isn't that good, so there was a lot of scrubbing through and reviewing footage throughout the whole editing process.

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Episode Three: 33 - Examining Archive Footage, i

I could now focus on what I wanted to be on the screen, and how I wanted to fill in space, besides merely showing Toshi speak at an interview. Before figuring out what images would go where, I needed to take a survey of what I had from Toshi's archive. This was a lot to slog through. Intermixed with proper footage was a lot of photographs, and it was all poorly labeled. So in addition to figuring out what I even had, I had to develop a naming convention for the files so that I could more easily find what I was looking for later.

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Episode Three: 32 - Organizing the footage, v

At this stage, the whole film was only the interview footage. I knew that I wouldn't be able to add additional footage or shots until I knew what I would keep, and what I would drop. So after a few more passes, I got it down to about eleven minutes, which I knew was enough to work with. After all, experience had told me that a few more minutes would be able to be cut, simply by cleaning up the dialogue in order to flow more smoothly (without a lot of "umms" and other pauses that we all take when we speak).

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Episode Three: 31 - Organizing the footage, iv

After organizing and lining up all of the footage with b-roll and audio, I then had to transverse all of this and figure out how to generate some kind of story out of this. One constraint that I knew I would want to work within was to keep the final documentary under ten minutes. Here was about two hours of footage, so it was challenging to decide what stayed, and what didn't.

All that said, one thing that made this a bit easier was that I knew some of the interviews had duplicate content. Striving for variety, if there was some duplicate content that I wanted, I would try to use the footage from the interview that seemed to be featured less in the whole. That meant trying to maximize the content from the second and third interview, which were both only around twenty minutes each.

After the first few passes at this, it seemed to emerge that there were at least ten different sub-stories that Toshi was telling here: 1) Arriving in New York, 2) Dream Making, 3) Dancing, 4) Teaching, 5) Auditions, 6) New York City, 7) Japan, 8) Learning English, 9) Immigrant Status, and 10) His Achievements. Of course, several of these would be combined and rearranged, but at least this was a start. In order to keep these different stories together, I separated them by a long black screen that would serve as a transition later in the film. At this point, the project was twenty minutes long. Thus, I knew that I would have to cut it at least in half from what I currently had. At this stage, this seemed unreasonable, but that's why we keep working.

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Episode Three: 30 - Organizing the footage, iii

Since it had been a few months since actually shooting the interviews, I had forgotten a lot about the footage. One thing that I regretted was that I had learned so much producing the two music videos, especially the second one. By now I knew how to use my camera properly, and how to maximize the settings to give me more of what I wanted. Because of this learning, I quickly recognized some of the less-than-ideal footage that I shot in the summer. This was especially clear in the second interview, at Toshi's home. Oh well. That's what I have to work with, and I could only work with what I've got.

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Episode Three: 29 - Organizing the footage, ii

You will see that I settled on using Final Cut Pro. To produce the first episode of Listen To The City Breathe, I used iMovie, but that had severe limitations in terms of how much footage I could stack on top of each other. But Final Cut Pro allows me to line up so much footage on top of the other, which is very helpful when I am still trying to decide which shot I want to use for some line of spoken dialogue.

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Episode Three: 28 - Organizing the footage, i

I knew that I had a ton of interview footage of Toshi, and that it would be a lot to sort through. The first step that needed to be done was to aline the footage. That is, get the a-roll, b-roll, and audio to all line up so that it could be substituted easily.

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Episode Three: 27 - Convert Audio from Stereo to Mono

Another lesson that I forgot from the first two episodes, since it was already four months since working on episode 2, is that I had to remix the interview audio into mono, from stereo. Because it was recorded in stereo, all the audio was mixed to the left channel, leaving the right channel completely empty. This was an extra step that had to be taken using Logic.

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