The Start of Molly the Tea Lady’s Edit.

Over the Christmas break I have been working on creating a rough cut for the story of ‘Molly the Tea Lady. Originally I was going to make a fifteen-twenty minute documentary containing various mysterious stories from around Somerset. However I have now decided I will edit each individual piece to make single units as well as feature them all within the documentary ‘Myths, Legends and Hauntings of Somerset’.
When I first began the edit, I was unsure of where to start because I had quite a bit of footage of Ros telling the story and her various encounters and I wasn’t sure what parts to include and what parts to leave out. I decided the best way to try and resolve this problem was to go through my transcript thoroughly – referring back to the footage marking down all good shots, and stories. Then numbering each shot I thought would be great to include and in what order. I found this helped me a great deal, by getting my edit going although I did find once I had engrossed myself within the rough cut I tended to forget about the transcript and my notes and just started moving, cutting and altering the material to what I thought looked and worked best.
As I mentioned in a previous blog entry I did have a feeling I may encounter a few issues with some of the footage we had filmed due to it being a little shaky and possibly unusable, this was the case for some of it – which was slightly frustrating, but I was able to overcome the problem and I did find although some of the visuals were shaky the sound was still fully useable.
During the edit, I realised that some of the additional and cut away shots were not always long enough for what I required, this is something I defiantly need to take into account when filming the next story.
I have now completed a first rough cut, which lasts five minutes, thirty nine seconds, which I personally feel is too long for this story. I originally planned to make each story about five-minutes but with ‘Molly the Tea Lady’ story I now feel it only needs to be around three-minutes. I know this will alter the duration of my full documentary but ‘Quality is better than Quantity’. Also I could possibly submit the completed short film of ‘Molly the Tea Lady’ into Channel 4’s ‘Three Minute Wonder’.