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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