Let me first give a brief description of the movie. "The Approach" is a rock climbing film that focuses on the lifestyle of different rock climbers in the area. We have our two main characters, one is a "Dirt bagger," who is a climber that doesn't own a house and pretty much lives out at the wall in his tent and climbs year round. The other main character is our "Corporate" climber, the guy who has a full-time job and has to balance work with his passion for rockclimbing. It is a film about life vs. lifestyle.
The post-production of this project began with me, because I was made in charge of managing all of the media. I was completely overwhelmed with the hours and hours of footage that we kept getting. The first order of business was to start organizing and logging this footage. Many students in the class had no post-production experience, and I had only a little experience. It was my job to give out assignments to people to go through and log all of the footage and go through the interviews we were getting and to listen to them and make markers and write descriptions of what they were saying so our main editor could easily go through and pull out the stuff that he needs. Each day we filmed something that folder of footage was labeled usually the day and the location of the shoot. We would make individual final cut pro projects of each shoot usually and separate all of the footage into separate bins, and that was basically our logging breakdown. Within each project their would be bins labeled: Scenic b-roll, b-roll, interviews, climbing, and behind the scenes. We found that was the best way to have multiple people logging this footage and for it all to generally look the same.
Once we got about 3/4 of the way through shooting me and one other guy began making trailers for the film. The one guys made a simple trailer that just had climbing and b-roll in it along with some text to help tell the story, whereas I was working on a trailer that had the dialogue from the people we interviewed to help sum up our story. It was at that time where someone actually started going through the interviews to see what the story was. Documentary film is so run and gun and kinda unscripted, and at the beginning of the class we had a treatment written up and we tried to stick to that treatment based on the questions we were asking people and the answers they were giving, but now in post production it is interesting to see how the story can kind of stray from the treatment based on the people we were getting to know and the stories that they were telling us.
Luke Draper, who works for CMI and teaches post-production classes here at dixie, was assigned to be our lead editor. Luke's job in this whole process is to kind of help guide us and to put together the final product. Luke is our lead editor and me and one other guy are assistant editors. The unfortunate thing is that Luke had not been on one single shoot, he hadn't looked through one minute of footage, and he didn't even know who our main characters were. whereas i was on just about every shoot and i have listened to every interview multiple times and i know the list of our footage like the back of my hand. So a collaboration process had to take place and is continuing to take place between me, Luke, the writer, the director, and the other assistant editor. We all have sit down together multiple times to make sure everyone is on the same page. Luke has undertaken the roll to put together the intro of the film and all the graphics and things like that, along with the end and he has given me and the other assistant editor assignments as well. As of right now I put together a seven minute section on the "Dirt baggers" and I am currently (literally right now as I take a break to write this blog post) in the process of editing together our corporate climber section which will be another seven minutes probably. The other assistant editor is currently putting together a montage of our best climbing footage that will probably be two minutes, and then he pieced our philosophy section together where he pulled interviews down and put a short 15 minute story together about the philosophy of climbers and their approach to life, and then Luke is taking that 15 minutes and breaking it down shorter and putting music and b-roll to it.
After speaking and collaborating with Luke on multiple occasions, he says that I am extremely fortunate to be working on this project because he thinks this is a great story and that this looks like by far the best documentary that any class has made at Dixie. He says it is really nice having a couple students like myself and the other assistant editor who took the initiative to take on a huge part of this project, and who was talented enough to actually be in charge of putting a piece of the story together that is actually a final product in the movie. As of right now we are about 3/4 of the way done editing, we have until thursday to piece together the last sections, and then thursday Luke is going to take all the sections and put it all together finally on a timeline and then he is going to make sure all the sections transition well, and then we are giving it off to Ben Braten to do the color correction and to tinker with our audio. The film Premieres Wednesday, May 2nd at the Red Cliffs Theater at 7 p.m. Keep in mind that this is probably going to just be a rough cut, and then if we have to film anything more or move some stuff around we will over the summer to get it ready for film festivals in the fall. Overall this class has been the most beneficial and the most rewarding of any class here at dixie, along with taking 24 credits this semester this documentary film class has been like having a full time job because we (about 10 commited people) just made a 44 minute tv hour long documentary in about 3 months! And Its almost time to get the reward of seeing the finished product, and having my name as a big part of this film.
attached below are links to the trailers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN-WRdEVarw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YgeVgc0-o0
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