Editing sucks. You know it’s true, because it does – especially when you’re working with the footage of four different shooters in the same location.
It is always better to have more than enough than not enough. I can say this applies with the b-roll we collected over the weekend. Working in a bigger team has definitely presented us with a challenge in terms of organizing and deciding what b-roll to use. Given the small space we were in, we have many of the same footage with slightly different angles.
Looking back at the a-roll, we just realized that the microphone of the close-up angle stopped working so the audio is void. We’re working around it… We’ll add it in last, because it won’t properly multicam.
However, I whipped up a preview with some footage of Trish, executive director of Red Lodge Transitional Services, presenting us with a prayer and an afternoon smudge. The act of smudging is the Native American tradition of burning sacred herbs in an abalone shell to purify the room or to bless yourself or someone else.
Considering that filming or photographing any sort of spiritual act is prohibited, we are lucky that Trish is allowing us to film her smudging. Trish’s house provided us a lot of b-roll opportunities with all her Native American memorabilia around her living room.
As I am writing this blog post, we are struggling to match the b-roll with our a-roll. Jackie talked a lot, and it took at least a couple hours to even organize and structure the narrative arc alone. Now that we have developed that, we’re lacking b-roll that directly correlates with what she says. A majority of what Jackie talks about has to do with spirituality and prison – both of which take us back to the issue we started with of the limitations we have.
