As you can see in previous blog posts for this piece I was involved as Sugini's AD in pre-production leading up to filming helping her discuss ideas and make decisions about the best actions to take and assisting her in the pre-production process as and when she needed help or wanted to talk through things. It was really nice to get to be involved in this, however I was involved during the production stage as she was shooting in Sri Lanka for 4 week and I was unable to fund myself to go here with her and also unable to take that much time away from my own project. I however am now back involved now she is back as she has completed her filming and now moved into the post-production editing stage. We have had a few brief chats in the past few weeks about thing like arranging footage and logging etc however on Friday afternoon I had an official in depth meeting with her to talk about where she had got to with the edit and see if I could help in anyway. She showed me some of her footage, showed me her planned narrative story and showed me her current timeline of interview footage which is nearly 3 hours long. She was really struggling to cut it down and extract the essentials and as it is in the Tamil language I wasn't able to help too effectively by watching it. Instead she ran through her plan in detail about the story and the story arc she had planned and her fathers timeline of events. I would then help her find better ways of thinking about then and discussed others ways of thinking when editing to help keep only the important and exciting bits but still have it flow. It helps that I am also an editor so I have knowledge on this subject and am able to a assist in this way too. The main things we spoke about specifically edit wise are:
She should aim to cut down the piece to 1 hour however it will probably help her if as she in narrowing it down she begins to already start adding visuals to the interview footage as the visuals will actually allow her to see what works well and what doesn't and then she will be able to refine a lot more based on this as well.
The introduction should introduce the place and culture most importantly and then introduce him as the voice afterwards. Balance between necessary info like introducing her father needs to be balanced with poetic beautiful information about Sri Lanka and his culture to allow some really beautiful visuals and this would be a great way to start to captivate the audience then once you have their attentions then show her Dad visually introducing himself. Sugini agreed that this would help her cut out information as well because then she can grab the audience with information but also visuals and therefore doesn't need to physically say as much about certain things which are shown visually. She also sees how excitement can be added by changing the order around slightly rather than only have the order that he spoke in because introducing him first isn't the most captivating thing about this documentary.
The teenage section of the piece seems like the most important really building towards the main climax so she really needs to work on focusing here in picking up the pace with the editing and making sure to use visuals which start to emphasise that disruption in her fathers story. Then the peak of the piece needs most time spent on it out of all of them as this is about the war and is really hard hitting stuff. Again she should choose her visuals wisely finding poetic visuals which mimic the fearful emotions felt by her father in this section.
After the main peak section we move into a slightly sadder emotion and she can really use this to gradually decrease the tension and fear by slowing the pace right down to again reflect the emotion of this section but also allowing the audience time to reflect themselves in this intense section and then move into feeling the sadness and using visuals which again poetically match this.
For the end resolution section it shouldn't go into too much cliche detail talking about how everything has been nicely resolved, instead it should still be reflecting back on what has happened but with positive outlooks on overcoming everything.
Another point I made is that majority of her audience won't speak Tamil so will be reading the subtitles so its really important to keep this in mind as it will be a different experience for someone who can understand as it would be to someone reading subtitles because the subtitles will seem like ready poetry with this picturesque images and that can really be used to her advantage to make some beautiful images which match really beautifully with lines of poetry almost.
Lastly we spoke about something I mentioned a lot which is editing with emotion! This is a technique Ive learnt from studying poetic visuals and then employed myself and found it to be really helpful. It is always best to know the emotional intention behind each section or scene and really think into that before and during editing so that you can consciously make sure the editing style as well as the visuals and everything else all feeds into that emotional internet that you had.
This meeting was really nice as I loved hearing about how Sugini's filming went and how much it has continued to develop since I was last able to be involved. I also really enjoyed being about to get involved again and help more from an editing point of view this time as this is another one of my passions and I really have enjoyed working on a piece like hers which is so interesting to me teaching a lot I didn't know about her culture and subject matter and also allowing me to work on something so different.
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