The Edit

Being the editor this was, of course, the part of the project I was most involved in. I feel I pulled my weight an did plenty of work in this area and very much appreciated the help I got from other members of the group all the way through the edit. While I did much of the fine tuning on the visuals (and a lot of the sound along with Rhys) I very much felt the edit was a collaborative process. Natalie was a great assistant editor, sitting in constantly and helping me see things I might have otherwise missed while Joeley assumed the role of director and pushed to see different ways of doing the edit which helped refine and improve throughout. Rhys was also extremely helpful and turned up often, as did Lewis even though his role was essentially completed in Liverpool.

The edit itself was a very involved process and we all spent a long time refining and perfecting it. The initial rough cut was done mostly without sound as we didn't have access to the sound files until a bit later, but it was useful to help us get to know the rushes and go over which parts we wanted to use. Unfortunately during capturing one of my worst fears was realized: I noticed that during filming the gain had been left on (and fairly high) giving all the shots an extremely noisy, grainy look which in some ways ruins the film.

An example of one of the unfortunately grainy shots

Ignoring this however I think we ended up with a very tight and well paced edit that is well considered and does justice to the people we interviewed.

The final look of the edit

We originally wanted to do our documentary on the busking legislation that was being brought in by Liverpool City Council. However it was difficult to fit this into the five minute limit while still being able to properly introduce the buskers and have them talk about their careers. What we eventually went with after much discussion was a film that simply looked at what it was like to be a busker in Liverpool. We took small clips from all the interviews and used them to paint a picture of a career that people perhaps don't really think about too much. We show how you might get started as a busker and the implication that it can often be an accident. We show where it might lead and how public reaction are reasons why people might choose to do this. We also show some of the negative aspects in how it can be hard to find a spot sometimes, though we look at this in quite a light hearted way as that is the way it came across in interviews.

We use a lot of cut-aways to shots that show little character moments from the buskers. My personal favourite is the way Chris (the guitar soloist) is introduced with a short clip of him examining a sandwich in a bag. It's not explained (what had actually happened is some charitable Christians had approached him and given it to him), but it's a nice little clip that introduces his character and shows something that you might not normally see of a busker. We also cut-away to each of the busker's money boxes which I think is an effective technique (similar to the one used in pockets) as it shows their livelihood in a simple and effective way.

Chris and his sandwich

An example of one of the money boxes

Sound was quite an issue during the edit. Rhys' sound recordings were actually fairly good quality. The levels were good and in most of the interviews there was not too much background noise (I did have to noise reduce Chris' interview, but it still is far too noisy really). However the team decided to record the sound and images separately and did not think to use a clapper board (or an alternative) and so syncing the sound was very difficult in some places. For example syncing the saxophonist playing with the sound was nigh on impossible as it's very hard to tell what the fingers are actually doing on a saxophone. It was a fairly laborious process, but I did manage to sync just about everything properly. Another issue was the song we wanted to use as the intro. There is a moment where Jonny goes into his solo where the notes he plays are incredibly distorted and it was ruining the feel of the intro. I imported the sound into Soundtrack Pro and carefully cut out the distorted part, making sure to leave music that still flowed and made sense by it's 4/4 time signature and chord structure. Difficult, but definitely worthwhile. Rhys (and Natalie) went through and did much of the fine tuning to the sound in the final edit using crossfades between interviews and keyframes to dip the sounds of music when people were talking etc.

Examples of using keyframes to dip the sound for certain parts of the film

There was a fair amount of touching up that needed to be done on the original shots. Some of them had the boom mic creeping into shot which needed to be cropped out (which unfortunately accentuates the grainy look) while, because it was filmed in natural light, the lighting was inconsistent and some brightness and colour correction needed to be applied in other shots. This mostly involved bringing out the yellow in some shots to make it match up to the brighter shots in which the sun was out.

Overall I am very proud of the edit and the way the film comes across. The graininess is a shame, but it was out of my control and I feel that I did my part to a fairly high standard and ended up with a well made documentary.