Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

A small part of one of our interviews (Quicktime Movie, 1.6Megs) in Colombia.

I decided to start editing really short bits of the Colombia documentary I did but never edited… Valentina

Went to see Maria Full of Grace last Saturday. It’s a good movie, not all doom and nastyness, but just real people doing real things.

As someone who has lived in Colombia (and my gf who is from Colombia agrees), I can say Colombia is exactly as portrayed in the movie. My gf said the moto guy was exactly like the real moto guys she knew in Colombia.

I’ve shot a documentary in Colombia earlier this year, and in the beginning of the movie, I kept thinking “we have that footage!”. All the scenes where shot in places we have shot or at least been to as well (Queens, NYC; the airport; Medellin Colombia, Bogota). Of course, we don’t have that story, nor that acting, nor that moviemaking talent.

Through the strangeness that is Google, I am the number one result returned for a search on how to make a documentary.

Went to see Supersize me, a home-made documentary about a guy who eats nothing but McDonalds for a month. Thoroughly entertaining and informative, it’s a great documentary, made with cheap gear. It encouraged me to finish the documentary I’m working on. It won’t be this good, but it might be passable…

Another First-Time Filmmaker (11/99).

Sound is by far the most technically complex aspect of the documentary, at least for me. We used an excellent shotgun mike. I plugged it in the wrong hole a few times, and for some tracks, for some strange reason I haven’t been able to figure out, the sound was recorded mono (not stereo) and too loud. It doesn’t sound good. I’ll try to figure out a way to reduce it’s volume while making it sound better.

$14 Steadycam: build your own steadycam.

On a related note, I’ve started editing the Colombian documentary using Vegas 4.0 on my $800 Windows XP computer (+ $160 external 160 Gig harddrive).

I’ve already uploaded 3 hours of video in my project and Vegas hasn’t flinched. I was worried about being able to edit 20 hours of video on my cheap machine, but now I feel confident. I love Vegas.

I skimmed through the manual today on the train (for about 1 hour), and I think I know everything I need to now. The interface is remarkably easy to learn, because everything maps to easy to visualize real-life metaphors.

One thing I’m trying to figure out that the manual didn’t talk about much is how to organize all that video while editing. I created a “temp” track where I park stuff temporarily, a “final” track that should contain the final edit, and a track for each of my 23 tapes (so I can easily refer to my printed log that shows all the scenes on each tape with notes).

Vegas lets you add notes and stuff, but even after only having 2 tapes (2 hours) of video on their tracks and taking out cuts and moving them into the final track, I’m getting confused on how to manage this.

I am cutting out cuts of their track and moving them into the “final” track so I know which cuts I already used. I can then look at the tape 7 track for example and see if there’s anything else in there (not yet cut out) that should make it into the final track. I think this will work.

I also created a “filler” track: images of mountains and roads and nature and such that can be used as filler pretty much anywhere in the documentary - as opposed to cuts of action or interviews that need a specific place.

Any ideas on organizing this stuff in while editing are very welcome!

Hey, I’m numbe three for a how to make a documentary Google search.

I’m happy to report that loggnig the documentary happens pretty much at live speed. I just run the tape and log as it goes. So 20 hours of tape means 20 hours of logging. Not too bad.

I created a table in Word. The first column has the timecode (0:25:41), the second the scene (”plane”), the third details (”old man looking”), the fourth comments (”nice image - bad sound”). I only use the comments for 1 out of every 5 rows, more or less. A 1 hour tape turns into about 2 pages in Word. I just run the video on the TV and type in my Word doc as it goes.

I’ve returned from filming in Colombia and now I have 22 tapes (about 16 hours) of video to edit.

The first step is to get an idea of what you have. I fast forwarded through most of the tapes, and used my digital camera to make screenshots of the TV. I then printed out the screenshots (using Windows XP’s printing wizard makes it very easy) per scene. I laid out all the scenes to have an easy way of discussing them and getting an overview. Think of it as a high-level sitemap.

Next I will have to watch all 16 hours and make a detailed log: at this timestamp, a man with donkey passes. This timestamp, the interviewee talks about X. I expect this to take 2 weeks, I’ll report back. And yes, it’s like a content inventory. Yey.

Related posts:

1. How to make a documentary
2. Logging the documentary
3. Editing the documentary
4. All the posts about documentary making and the Colombian documentary

I am leaving tomorrow morning to Colombia to make my first documentary film ever. I always wanted to make a documentary.

I’ll be using a little consumer digital mini-DV camera (a Sony DCR-PC120BT, around $800). I bought it six months ago, and I’ve made a few small movies of friends and stuff to practice since.

Here’s an overview of what I’ve learnt so far:

1. Image quality (lens, resolution) of a consumer camera is good enough for this documentary. It looks fine played back on a television.
2. How I film it has a big impact on the perceived image quality. Use a tripod for many shots. Be aware of lightning.
3. Showing the visual evidence is more important for a documentary than shooting pretty shots.
4. Hold that shot! First lesson not to look like an amateur: hold that shot. Don’t start zooming, panning and so on if not absolutely necessary. This was a hard lesson but I think I’ve got it.
5. Sound is the hardest thing to get right. As long as you point your camera in the right direction and your battery is ok and you have enough film, you’ll get decent visuals. But sound is very hard to get right, and if you get bad sound there is no way to get it good again. I bought a small $70 Sony shotgun mike that goes on the camera, but that didn’t really produce good sound either, so we borrowed a professional shotgun mike from a friend. The mike’s bigger than the camera. This may sound a bit exagerated, but it’s necessary. The mike in the camera (and even the outside mike I bought) just suck to the point of the sound being unusable.
6. Editing on the computer is easy. I am using Vegas 4.0.
7. When you’re finally doing the shoot, you don’t want technical problems. So I bought a backup battery and lots of tapes. I’ll start a new tape at every shoot, even if the previous tape was only half full.
8. It’s nice to shoot little scenes that can complete other scenes (for example when you have a part that’s not usable because it’s out of focus).
9. You can’t know exactly how the documentary will work out before doing it. (At least, I don’t).
10. You should watch what you filmed every evening to get a feel for what you’ve got, and where the documentary is going.

Me and my girlfriend have found a way of working for interviews and such that seems to work: she asks the questions and points the mike, and I film and listen to the headphones to make sure the sound’s ok. We practices a little bit - I’ll report back on how it worked out.

We are going to film for about a week. Until then.

ZNet | Venezuela | The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - An interview with documentary filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain”