Finally!
The editing of Headwind started. Well, actually the editing of a short film for Vluchtelingenwerk Nederland (Dutch Council for Refugees) composed of Headwind footage. It’s apart from a nice assignment a good exercise in Final Cut Pro X editing. Which is for unexperienced editors like me quite beast to handle.
Now it also becomes clear what editing a film really means when there’s a footage library of almost 50 hours of HD video in 49 MiniDV HD tapes which is something like 1 Terabyte digital footage in hundreds of takes. And that is excluding music, separate audio files, texts, subtitles, graphics and all kinds of other stuff that will be glued into what is supposed to be my first feature documentary. To be released mid April. And what a film it’s going to be. The storyline is great and the footage amazing, so it now all comes down to making the best possible edit with just the right artistic approach combined with a compelling and clear storyline.
I like editing although I find that it’s almost impossible to edit continuously for much more than five hours per day. It’s like making a 5D puzzle with dimensions like story, images, sounds, time, color, effects, subtitles and graphics. Final Cut is, although a great software package for most of the advanced stuff still like a frikkin maze to me. I now know how to glue scenes and work on stabilizing footage, color correction and adding and levelling audio, making transitions and simple effects, titles and subtitles, embedding stills and graphs but the really advanced editing is still beyonf me. But editing a work like this is like a (very) steap mountain, a learning curve like I haven’t experienced in the past decade working on all kinds of creative stuff.
I know the White Stork Films production team (co-director and executive producer Eveline van de Putte, Nepal producer Vidhyapati Mishra, audio editor Lucas Verheij and myself as director and producer) are counting on me to guide us through the edit stage straigth to te completion of the documentary in April. Quite a load to carry and quite a great work to create with a great team!

The White Stork Films production team in Nepal:
Co-Director and Executive Producer Eveline van de Putte
Nepal Producer Vidhyapati Mishra and me.
Editing is like heaven. Fooling around with the footage, making things look great in stead of just good and continuously not being satisfied with the results. I just love it.
Editing is like hell. The edit is never good enough, the sound never like it should be, the footage always a bit touched by shake or other disruptions and that one little scene is never there in the available footage. The whole process is extremely exhausting and it continuously drives me crazy. And the damn computer is NEVER fast enough. Not while editing and certainly not while rendering the sucker of an edit.
Ah well, I suppose I will get used to it. I am afraid I just have to. And I will continue dreaming of that studio facility with faster computers and a proper editing desk in stead of a couple of Macbook Pro‘s and a 21 inch monitor for previewing. But hey, dreams are important and usually come true in real life after the content of the dream was most needed.
For the next three months I will be unavailable, leading a hermits life with my computers and equipment in a dark editing room. Most of the time all alone, struggling, fighting and leaving all kinds of stuff at the floor of the cutting room.
Alice © 2012











