Visual Vignettes from Incredible India

An attempt to capture a festival on film…

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Anil: Take any pictures?

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Tara: Four hundred photos. Forty footage clips. That’s after pre-editing and throwing out the failures.

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Anil: Is there a theme? Is there a message? Is there a story coming through?

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Tara: That’s the trouble. Shooting randomly at a festival. Lots of tiny vignettes but no story running though them all. And not many audible comments.

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Anil: It was an Indian festival. In Tokyo. Multiculturalism?

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Tara: Indian dances with Japanese dancers. Food, culture, music, people. And parrots. A lot of fun.

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Voice-over

Festivals may seem rich seams for filming. Leaving aside the difficulties of shooting in crowds, the blurs, the interrupted shots, it is possible to create short stories told in images and short takes. A series of visual vignettes.

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Film editors need librarian skills

The film editor shares her organizational insight…

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Amanda: There are a couple of things that slow up film editing workflow. One is having total familiarity with the editing software. Example: you waste a lot of time going looking for the voice-over option on the menu. Or how to change the color on a text font.

Amanda Fix
Whitmore College

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Intern: So you need to have it down pat.

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Amanda: It’s got to be second nature.

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Intern: And the other thing?

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Amanda: A consistent filing system for all the footage and stills in the Library.

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Intern: A classificatory system like Dewey?

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Amanda: Known to the editor and his or her assistants. Date, time, place, subject. Unvarying.

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Voice-over
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Editing, for all the art in it, also benefits from the skills librarians have. Such as knowing where to go in the library and being able to immediately pull a book from the stacks. Maybe that’s why the place where footage and stills are kept is actually called “the Library”.

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