Post-Production Seminar

Today was the first post-production seminar of the module. We began by each sharing a piece of  TV or film that we have watched recently, as we were told that any such media was viable to break down and analyse editing. That said, an example was made of 'Breaking Bad', which we were told not to analyse as most of our time would be taken up trying to explain the context behind each episode or scene. This differed with 'Game of Thrones' however, which although also has a huge amount of sub-plots to deal with, could be easier analysed because each individual scene was more discrete.

After this we were given more information about the module, including the set texts and our project brief. We were told to watch 'Senna' (Asif Kapadia, 2010) because it is an example of 'perfect editing', and to read 'In the Blink of An Eye' by Walter Murch. As part of our independent work we were also told to research Murch by reading his work and watching his video lectures, giving our opinions of him next week.

We were given our project brief, to create a 4-5 minute documentary from a bank of footage, creating a clear narrative, establishing empathy with the film's subjects and using sounds from the clips to create an original sound design.

Next we were introduced to the new editing software that we would be learning and using for the year - Avid Media Composer. In this first session we were shown the very basics: how to setup a new project with the correct settings, how to create a bin and import footage to it, and the beginnings of assembling a sequence using the 'In/Out' markers. We were also shown how to alter some of the general settings such as the time-code - which was by default set to the American format.

In the time before the next session I will import the footage for the documentary edit into our new Avid project, and will attempt to check each clip individually for naming and labeling.