Shop Moving

Yesterday I spent the day following the container which had been the booking office and shop at Pont Croesor as it was taken to Blaenau. It was a long day but I didn't work as hard as the people actually doing the move. Today I've uploaded and edited a package which will be on You tube and will probably form a chapter in the Year in the life of the F&WHR 2012. It will get a re edit nearer the end of the year as there will be shots of it in action and so on to add.

Once I had loaded all the footage from the camera onto the computer I was faced with over an hour and twenty minutes of footage but I wanted the finished piece to be about ten minutes. The hardest part was telling the story of the move and selecting pictures which helped do this. To some extent it is obvious what to leave out; there was quite a lot of 'nothing happening but it is about to' footage from yesterday. It is easier to cut this out than to invent it after the action has started. E.g waiting for a train to come around a corner, it is much better to start the camera rolling before you see the train so you get the whole shot.

My first edit purely involved cutting out unusable shots and the above mentioned waiting. This got it down to about 25 minutes. The next process is to start making a few more 'artisitic' judgements and to cut out or cut down the length of dull shots. This got me down to about about 16 minutes; getting there.

The next process is to add captions, this really makes me concentrate on the 'narrative arc'. The more captions needed the less well I've captured the essential story in picture terms. I only needed half a dozen or so today so hopefully it all makes visual sense. Once I've captioned it, I watch it through again take out any more surplus material. This is usually starts and ends of shots. having done this I had it down to just over 13 minutes but I didn't want to remove anything else so this is its finished length.

Before I render it and upload it to Youtube I get Andrew Thomas the F&WHR spin paramedic to make sure my captions make sense and are puntuated and spelled properly, not my strongest suit.

See what you think.