Over the past week we have been putting together the final version of the poetic documentary following the feedback we received during the crit tutorial.
Most of the comments seemed to revolve around the pacing of the film in its first half, so I shared this with our editor Elliot and stayed with him whilst he re-cut the interview. The second half of the film I had cut quite heavily and this we knew was the better half, so it was a process of doing the same, cutting together phrases to form coherent sound-bytes and making sure that the progression of the story was logical - starting with how he got into cycling and ending with what his continued interest in watching it on TV.
Whilst editing down the interview we were careful not to remove too much of the nuance, such as laughs and pauses for thinking - but also to make sure that we were as efficient with our time as possible. To do this, we created our own short breaks between phrases to let the audience have time to take it in. We also felt it was appropriate that when George speaks about his friend who died in the Tour de France to keep in his pauses in speech, to convey that its a difficult subject for him to talk about. There were also other phrases which we would have liked to include but were just too difficult to hear clearly, so we managed to edit around this too.
Debbie remarked that it was difficult to work out who George is in the photograph, so we included the line where he talks about this. In this section he speaks about how he never won a race, but in the interview repeated himself a few times so this required some heavy cutting to make best use of the time. We had the choice of two endings to use - one where he jokes about his wife getting rid of his bike and the one with him saying how he'd 'been there and hadn't done it'. We ended up keeping the latter as during the crit tutorial we were praised on it, and it effectively sums up his cycling career and character in one phrase.
With regards to the music, which had been provided to me by the composer I talked with, we were advised to remove the light piano from the track as it was overly sentimental and too sombre, dictating the audience's emotion where it wasn't needed. I managed to get another version from him without the piano, but which built up to a small crescendo as the photo was revealed. We tried out this on the film but it didn't seem to fit, as George's tone doesn't change to meet the music. Instead, I took the single drawn out tone from the start of the music and looped it throughout the film, bringing the pitch down in the edit to provide a basis for adding the sound-scape afterwards. Without this, the breaks in dialogue and SFX were quite clear and jarring and so we kept it in.
For the creation of the sound-scape, Jamie recorded a number of bike sounds and ambient tracks in parks over the weekend, and I managed to source some royalty-free tracks of wind and crowds to experiment with. Jamie used Pro Tools to add the sounds to the interview track once we had finalised it, which initially seemed too heavy and forced and didn't work well with the voice-over and music. We then tried to use the sounds sparingly across the film and to add effects to the sounds like reverb and EQ to create a sense of ghostliness and the past. This seemed to work much better, especially with the sounds of the crowd which we played when George talked about the Tour de France.
Other sounds in the mix were sounds of wind, bikes on gravel, a wheel spinning and stopping, heavy breathing and countryside ambience, most of which we flowed between at a low volume so as not to distract from the voice-over. The most effective use of sounds which Jamie came up with was to use a metal clanging sound and a wheel slowly spinning down when George talks about the crash his friend was involved in, of which we were careful not to undermine.
We had some issues in AVID with the scans I took of the photos, which appeared with a blue tint that was difficult to correct. Due to time constraints, I was given the task of doing the slow zoom out on the image and assembling the interview and sound-scape at home using Sony Vegas, where I had created the rough draft previously without such issue. After getting the sound-scape from Jamie and the interview track I created and exported the film, tweaking minor areas such as the opening line and the final sounds lasting over the credits.
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