The Best Part

The most sastisfying part of the whole production process, at least for me, is putting everything together. Seeing your piece that you've planned out and have been thinking about and imaginging for days or even weeks finally starting to come out how you imagined. Its great. I mean just look at this timeline.

Its just so beautiful. I love color coding timelines. The editing itself tho can get a little tedious and exhausting. 

I edited the doc with Gabi, and we both have been in a tv production class for the 3 years we have been in high school, so we both know how to edit an interview. We made the general line edit from what I captured and what I remember being his best points and moments. We polished it up a bit, moved some stuff around, took stuff out, leveled audio, yada, yada. This is probably the most important part of the editing process, since I believe the structure of the piece really has an impact on how the piece is received by the viewer. If your just kinda throwing stuff around willy nilly, then the piece is gonna feel disjointed, the interviewee may repeat points, some parts may feel drawn out or irrelevant to the topic. A good structure helps the piece flow from one topic to another, and this comes from not only the questions you ask, but what you end up deciding goes in and where. This becomes even more important when taking into account the doc has to be a minimum of 5 minutes, which is a lot for just one person to be speaking, so Gabi and me had to really make sure that the doc flowed well. 

Once we got the sturcture and line edit down, we started putting in b-roll. This was mostly archive footage of conflicts in the past and the current conflict today, so me and Gabi would scour YouTube to find videos and clips of the conflict throughout history that fit what he was talking about. So many Youtube downloads. So many. Apart from this, we had come up with the idea that to transition from the exposition of where Yousef is from and how often he goes there and all that to him talking about the conflict, we would make this bulid up of news clips talking about the war in gaza and have the clips up for shorter and shorter time, ramping up the speed until we couldn't anymore. This paired with a riser made for a nice transition into Yousef speaking about the war and his connection and thoughts on it. 

In order to fix the lighting issues I had while shooting, we would have to manually color grade each shot so that they looked similar enough so that the lighting change was not noticeable. I think it ended up working great since nobody ever said anyhting about it, especially since the clips usually have b-roll in between so that it is not very noticable in between shots. 

Since Yousef is the only subject and is speaking for the entire time, we wanted to add some music to improve the piece and establish the tone for any given moment. We used it sparingly, only in moments that we believed needing it, and letting the rest of the piece breathe a little. All the music choices were soft and subtle pianos and can be easily missed if you arent paying close attention, which is the goal here. 

Last, but not least, the opening. At first, I thought that the piece could open with the news montage I talked about earlier, but then Gabi fought against it and preferred having it later and having Yousef be the first thing they see, which I came to agree with. But since thats what we had in mind for the opening, we didnt really know what to do. But then I remembered the b-roll shots I got of Yousef when I filmed him and found some stuff there that fit pretty perfectly as a little intro. Closeup shots of his hands and eyes, and then a wide of him sitting down, looking right at the camera. I was really glad that I ended up getting that b-roll. The wide shot was the perfect place to put a title, and we decided that "A War at Home" would be pretty appropiate since it was not only a war in Yousef's homeland, but also the repruccusions of the war that Yousef is feeling in his own home and in his own life in the U.S.

Here's the title shot

And thats it. I really enjoyed this project and it definetely opened up my eyes to the possibility of doing a documentary for my final. I'm quite proud of how it turned out, so here is the link to the final product.