23. Editing - Step 1, p1: Organizing location shots

The first stepGather the footage for each of the three mini movies based on interview locations, and edit out my voice. Here I had over thirty minutes of footage.

So for each location, I lined up the two cameras that I had, plus the audio recording. The only difficulty there was that at each location, I had begun audio recording much earlier than photography. This was because the mic was set up on his body, while he put the recorder in his pocket. That meant that there were several minutes of audio recording before the video recording began, and so syncing them up took a while to find the actual beginning of the photography in the audio.

One thing that made this a whole lot easier is that the iPhones recorded audio on their own, and so it was easy to hear where the audio was supposed to sync.

However, there was a quirk that I didn't expect to happen. While I might sync the audio from the Zoom recorder to the iPhone footage, as time went along, the audio and picture would slowly get out of sync. This was a frustrating development, and I wasn't sure if it was something that I had done incorrectly, or some technical problem between the two recordings. I suppose the source of the problem wasn't really that important since I developed a method to fix this. After every couple of minutes of footage, I would simply split the footage, both the audio and the picture, and slip the audio back by a fraction of a second. I don't know if this is the most technically sound solution, but it worked for me. To be sure, I always slipped the audio back at moments of silence, or times when I was asking the questions, since I knew that I was going to edit my voice out in the final cut.

Another oddity of the audio recording is that it was recorded in stereo instead of mono. So when I first heard it, it would only play in my left ear. This was annoying, so I had to go into a sound editing program and make all of the audio mono. This was an annoying step, and I wonder if I could have changed some setting on the Zoom recorder so that I could just record mono from the beginning.

After getting all my footage in order, I then edited out all of my speaking. This produced a lot of small clips of Ramon's answers to the questions. I did this for all of the three interview shots. Then after listening to all of footage like this, I decided that there were four main themes that I could divide all of the footage into. First, when he talked about New York City life; second when discussed his personal history before New York; third his work as a musician; and fourth when he discussed his family. 

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22. Editing - introduction

After deciding that this was all the footage I would shoot, the next task was to get to organize this footage in some interesting way. (In fact, I don't know how I came to the decision that this was all the footage I wanted, except to say that I wanted to finish the film.)

I didn't know how to approach the editing process. I have never edited together a documentary film before. When I made my previous films, I merely followed the script, and made little changes from there. However, in this documentary film, I had to extract some sort of script and ordering from the content that I shot. Thus, I had to structure the story in the editing process. At first, I wasn't sure how I would do that, but something did end up coming out.

Ultimately, looking back, this editing process basically involved the following steps, in order. (When I didn't follow this order, I messed myself up, and had to go back to fix things, and repeat steps.)

1) Organizing footage based on three shooting locations.

2) Organize each of the shooting locations into four themes.

3) Organize each of the thematic footage into one section.

4) Editing each thematic section with more focus.

5) Bring all of the edited thematic content together into one film.

6) Edit this whole film down to give more focus.

7) Incorporating incidental and secondary footage.

8) Add music.

9) Add titles and text.

10) Add transitions.

11) Final refinements.

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21. Location - Recording Studio

Ramon had told me that he would compose the main theme music for the film. I gave him the ideas and purposes for my doing this project, and a couple of possible examples, and off he went. I fancy myself a bit of a composer, so I tried my hand at the task before he finished. While my music survives in an early version of the title sequence, I quickly noticed that his music was much better suited to what I wanted.

So I was excited when he told me that I could go and shoot him record the music. He took me to Roca Firme Estudios in East Harlem. The space we had was very compact, but I felt my job was to merely stay out of the way, while they worked. I did that as best I could.

The only thing that I set up was the light box on its stand. Instead of setting up both cameras, I merely held the camera in my hand, and moved around the studio to get different shots at different times. There wasn't much interviewing going on, but I did get a lot of good footage that would serve very nicely as incidental shots. It was also a fun experience to see him working. I hope that came across in the final film.

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20. Interview - Cafe p3

Besides the limited space, the other hassle about filming in a cafe is that many of the nearby voices came through the audio, even though he had the mic. I could only imagine how much worse it would have been without the mic. In the future, this is something that I am really going to have to think about when filming in public spaces, like a cafe or restaurant.

One thing that I learned about these three interviews is that the setting also plays a role in how the interview passes. I've already said that doing the same (more or less) interview three times was helpful because new ideas would emerge. But I also think that the setting helps different ideas emerge easier than others. Looking back, all the spots seemed to have their themes, even if we talked about other stuff. Besides the location, perhaps the time of day, or how we woke up that morning also had an influence on how the interviews progressed. That all seems obviously true to me, so all the better that I conducted the interview on three different occasions. 

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19. Interview - Cafe p2

I tried to set up all my gear within a space that would be as little in the way as possible. I wanted to respect that they still had customers coming in. I set up one camera on the table where we sat, and had another camera on a tripod just to the left of the table. Unfortunately, it was in the walking way, but at least it wasn't completely blocking the path.

In order to save space, I didn't mount the light box, but instead held it in my hand, pointing it at Ramon. This wasn't such a hassle, except that when I finally got around to editing the footage, there were times when the light box was in the shot. I really regret that, but I hope that the viewer doesn't notice too much. I know that in very professional productions, sometimes a boom mic, or something like that finds its way into the shot, so I don't feel too bad about it. Perhaps I also don't think it's so bad because it is a documentary film. 

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18. Interview - Cafe p1

I knew all along that family life was very important to Ramon. For this reason, I really wanted to get a lot of shots at his home, in order to really illustrate what his everyday life was like. However, he felt that this was a bit too intrusive, and he didn't want cameras in his home. But as much as he would allow, I still wanted to get shots of other aspects of his life, especially his family, and to show a more complete picture of the real life of a New York City musician.

The closest I got to his home was a cafe around the corner from where he lives in Astoria, Queens. Besides having this as a substitute for his home life, I also saw the value of this setting for an interview location because I wanted some setting that was more casual, and more laid back than his working environment. This cafe kind of gave an idea of how he might try to relax, if he had a minute. We were lucky that the good people at Leli's Bakery were ok with this. 

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17. Interview - Park

After the studio, I knew that I wanted to get some footage of Ramon walking, and even conducting part of an interview while walking down the street. I like the idea of the dynamism that would lend to the footage.

Unfortunately, in the final film much of this footage is not used. The main reason for this is because I think the mic was not plugged into the recorder properly. The jack was a bit loose, so the audio was difficult to use. This was even true of the interview after the walk, when we were sitting in the park. I liked the shot, and I wish we could have used it, but... things happen.

Even still, most of the interview content from these interviews would have still been left on the edit room floor because it just didn't serve the central themes of the film; the content was far too tangential to where I finally decided to go. But I did utilize some of these shots as incidental shots for the film.

Perhaps some of this raw footage can be compiled for a more in-depth project of Ramon, or something like that. 

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