Post Production- Documentary

 Hi blog! To wrap up this project, here’s what Vicky and I got done regarding the post-production process. 

This was a PROCESS because I hadn’t ever taken on this big of a project with only one other person before, since last year I had 3 other people to help me. It was really cool to see a new part of every step in the process though, and I learned a lot throughout. 

You may be wondering what the name of this documentary is, and the reason I haven’t mentioned it is because until this point in the process, we didn’t know what to call it. We threw around some ideas like “Rifles and Flags” or “Guard Family” but nothing felt completely right, so we waited til after production, hoping that someone would say something in an interview that we could use. The name we ended up picking was actually just something Vicky and I thought of together though. The name we chose was “Winter Guard: The floor is our home”. We chose this name because it captures the found family tone of our documentary. 

On November 14th, I also created the graphics for the credits as well as the lower thirds that I knew we would eventually need to match the color scheme of the other graphics. I chose royal blue and gold to represent the Cypress Bay school colors and made them simple, since I realized that the background would already look really busy, so the more simplistic design was the better option. Like I mentioned earlier, Vicky and I had already designated the roles, so it was really easy to make the graphics for the credit sequence in the beginning. Also, since I know all of the guard interviewees personally, I knew how to spell their name just fine and had no problems making lower thirds. Here is a photo of my lower thirds and credit graphics: 

On November 15th, I watched all of the footage that we had from the interviews and cut the long video into small clips of each question and forwarded the ones I thought best told the story to Vicky since she was the main editor. I went through a lot of footage, and the entire process took me around 3 hours since we had 5 different interviews and around 20 questions from each of them. The clips that I ended up choosing were mainly the ones about personal experiences and basic understanding of guard so that the audience could not only get to know the activity, but also the people in it, since that was our goal for the documentary. Erick (tech) had an amazing interview, and it was the hardest to narrow down his answers because they all were really enlightening, but I think it would seem very imbalanced if we put more clips of him than anyone else, and we wanted a clear understanding of who every interviewee was. I believe I got about 90% of this process done on this day. Here is a photo of editing the editing process: 

On November 16, I finished cutting the clips for the interviews. I used premiere pro to do this process and Swiss transfer to forward all the clips to Vicky. Both were very easy and straightforward to use, making such a tedious process a bit less inconvenient. I also worked on the title graphic and decided what color scheme to have the whole thing go with. I used the same golf and blue as before, since those are our school colors, and the ones that guard wears and highlights a lot. I am really proud of the title graphic because it fits the theme very well, I believe, and ties into the story quite well. Here is what it looked like: 

THE FINAL DAY! On November 17, the big day, I pretty much wrapped up everything that needed to be done. Finished graphics, credits, and title for the doc, and talked about any problems with Vicky. I also helped find last minute archive footage that we needed for certain parts that we were unable to film to get the full effect. We decided not to put music into the documentary so that the focus would be the natural sound of the flags in the B-roll. However, I did help get the song for the intro sequence that had music. Here is one of the archive photos I sent to Vicky to include as well as the link to the song we used: 

Overall, I was very grateful for such good communication with Vicky for this project and really enjoyed trying something new while still making content about guard, which I care about so much. This project taught me so much, which I will tell you all about in my reflection:)