I am frantically, desperately, sadly, still editing "Death and Taxes," the documentary about war tax resistance that I've been working on for a year, if we count it from funding acquisition, or over 5 years, if we count from first conception and footage shot. Even though there's so much footage, and I've been doing this for so long, I've still learned so much as I edit these last 7 months or so. Every time I edit I learn or re-learn more about how to shoot. Here is a selection of key or not-so-key shooting tips:
- during interview, keep zooming in and out slowly, so that when you edit you can cut it up and the jump cuts won't be so jarring.
- don't be afraid to reshoot something, and to order people around (this is the hardest and probably the most important in documentary making).
- better to get it right during the shoot than try to fix it in post.
- you never have too much b-roll.
- if you have time and a camera that can do it, iterate the hour on the camera's time code as you shoot through tapes. That way when you capture, all your footage from a certain shoot will have unique timecode, makes it slightly easier to organize.
- watch as much footage as possible between shoots. Mistakes made or holes in coverage can be fixed if you know what you got or didn't get last time. If you wait till post to look, it's too late, probably.
There's probably more I could go into but it's late. very late.
Posted by steev at Diciembre 15, 2008 08:51 PM