Editing Commentary

So, I spent 12 hours on Tuesday, July 14 editing. Non-Tokyo Stories students decided that I was the person to go to if they had questions about FCP, so I spent a fair amount of time helping other students as well (the same thing happened on July 15th - my birthday, incidentally!). Anyway, let me just say that I am glad editing is over! The editing process was a good experience, but it's nice to have the stress lifted off my shoulders. Here is a summary of the various decisions and experiences during editing (which took place over the period of July 7th-July 15th):

- The first thing I did (after importing, of course) was to adjust the sound. I wasn't able to make decisions about what parts of the interviews I wanted to keep since I hadn't received translations yet, so I worked on this instead. I played around with audio filters a lot, especially on the Donald Richie interview. Because it was impossible to remove the ambient noise on his interview, I decided to keep the ambient sound on the other interviews as well to make the transitions less shocking. After deciding what clips I wanted to use, I also added cross fades in between every interview clip and extended/shortened the audio clips past their respective video portions in some instances.

- The second thing I worked on was deciding what sections of the interviews I wanted to use. I actually did this by looking at the transcripts of the interviews, rather than at the footage itself, in order to pick out relevant material. At first, I chose to include 2 clips for each thematic element, e.g., the history of Golden, but after actually editing the clips and watching them in succession, I noticed that the documentary would be too long and repetitive, so I decided one speaker per topic would suffice. Also, there was one clip that I had to edit considerably (one of the Richie portions), from about 45 seconds to 20 seconds, because there were too many dishes clanging in the documentary. All in all, I used 9 clips from the interviews (2 from Yamashita, 3 from Richie, and 4 from Tanaka), each at around a length of 30 seconds to keep the pacing consistent, so they totaled about 5 minutes in all (after I edited credits/b-roll, the movie was around 5:30).

- The second thing I worked on was the aesthetics of the video. Because of the insufficient lighting conditions of the bar interviews, the use of archival photos, and the theme of the video, I decided to make the entire documentary black and white. After desaturating everything, I spent a lot of time adjusting the contrast of the video. At first, I used the brightness and contrast and levels filters, but I read online that 3-way color balance filter actually works better, and it did indeed! So, it took some trial and error, but it worked out in the end.

- The last parts I worked on (almost all on Tuesday) were adding b-roll (I had to wait until Tuesday for this since I hadn't received the pictures from Tony's camera yet) and subtitles. Both of these processes entailed quite a few of obstacles. I think this might have partially been due to the fact that the project was due at 12 the next day, and since I had class, this was might last option to finish everything. I had wanted to finish the majority of the project by the previous week, so I kind of had a meltdown with Tony and Shinya about not getting the necessary materials to me - sorry about that! Anyway, with the subtitles, after I had finished adding all of them, Professor Carr informed me that I should change all of them to outline text, so I had to re-do all of them.

Similarly, I had to re-do the b-roll, but for different reasons. After choosing all the relevant b-roll, trimming them down to size, placing them, and adding transitions, I decided to trim part of the A-roll. After doing this last section, the whole timeline got screwed up, and in trying to fix it, I went past the limit for being able to undo the action. I thought I had saved right before making this faux pas, so I decided to exit without saving and reopen the project. Well, it turns out that I hadn't saved for about 2 hours - bad move! Thus, I had to basically do everything again.

Some other things I worked out were adding opening and closing credits and music, but these were both very easy tasks. I edited a bit on Wednesday, but this was mostly just polishing things up. Anyway, everything is done now thankfully!