Making of a documentary

I had barely started to learn digital editing three months ago when I took on the challenge of producing a documentary. I am passionate about serving my home town in any way I can even though I am eight thousand miles away. But passion, as it turned out, was not enough. I also had to dig in and utilize the other two p’s—patience and perseverance.

First, I got a two-hour VHS tape from Celia (She’s a soul, I believe, who has come down to help humanity). She had reduced her 10 hours of DV tapes into 2 hours and expressed her desire to trim it to 20-30 minutes show. God bless her heart! That was a big help for me. Initially I was wavering on whether to make one cut or two—one for fund raising (maybe 20 minutes long for Celia) and the other—30 minute long—to enter into documentary festivals. Yea, I am ambitious!

I got off on a wrong foot. After a few tries, I managed to upload the 2-hour footage into a computer. The editing program we use here at the Communication, Drama and Journalism Department is Adobe Premiers 6.5. I used a swappable drive, 40 gigs. The misstep was regarding the format. Since Celia had shot it in Nepal, I assumed, she might have used PAL. Well, no! It was in NTSC—a system used in North America and Japan, she convinced me. So I uploaded the whole thing in NTSC program after a few weeks break, maybe it was a month. At this juncture I was working for the publicity of dramas we stage at our two theatres. I was not even working for the TV production yet. The first glimpse of the digital editing I had was during the production of a 30-second public service announcement for my first play publicity—Once Upon a Mattress, a mucical.

But anyhow, the first step had been taken. I was off from the starting line, to say the least. I was hoping to be Seabiscuit—a perennial underdog that pulls it off. I had started working for TV production officially, so I was getting more exposure into intricacies of editing and god forbid, the cabling of the equipments. I was so green that I cannot believe I thought I could do this. But well, it seems it is always the people who know “nada” or “muy poco” that believe they can do things the rest of the world knows better—just like George Bush believing he can graft a flourishing democracy in Iraq under the supervision of mighty US military. Sorry, I cannot help but take a shot at this folly.

But my folly was less troubling; It cost no lives, only umpteen hours of frustration. Or what other people would call frustration and I call it a learning experience—or a test of the will—or the struggle of man against the machine—or maybe the test of my will against the devious, temperamental and thwarting nature of computer software and glitches. Or it was me vs. Adobe Premiere. Most likely it was me vs. me.

To be continued…