AT LEAST I HAVE ACTA — A Documentary
Full stop — the work I am proudest of, and the piece that best reflects both my editing style and skills. This documentary was made primarily by myself and the director, Eva Cain and, as the years have passed, I’ve only gotten happier that I helped create it. It was, by far, the most ambitious project I’ve ever edited. With hours and hours of both interviews and B-Roll to go over as well as a project time limit restriction to ten minutes, it was not an easy documentary to make. Not to mention the editing was done on a ten year old macbook, which wasn’t exactly equipped for the 5+ audio and video tracks in Premiere that I was working with. I remember having to render and export the project multiple times overnight, hoping and praying my laptop didn’t engulf itself in smoke and flames.
While, like Beeswax, I am hyper aware of every imperfection of this project as I have watched it over and over and over and over, I care far less about them here because I know how utterly passionate I was to make this. Similar to the building it’s about, the imperfections make it what it is. I poured so many hours, staying up all night editing because I knew this could be something great. And to this day, I believe that it is.
PREMIERE TIMELINE
Another Premiere timeline! Right off the bat, this one looks signifcantly cleaner than the one for Beeswax. Maybe the tidiness of the timeline doesn’t exactly correspond to quality, but that’s how I’m perceiving it nonetheless. When editing, I knew exactly the purpose of each audio/video track, so navigating it was quite simple. Once again, it may not look like much to you editor connoisseurs, but this was a pretty big one for me, and still is. I look at this premiere timeline like a damn work of art.
I like how we segmented the documentary in a way that made it so we split different aspects of the building using a black screen and these little VHS sound effect-transitions (the small segments incaudio track 2). Every one of those little lines indicates a new section of the building we’re focusing on. As you can see on the side, too, I constructed this mega-sequence by separating the documentary into smaller chunks and combining them all together. It was incredibly efficient and worked well in this case, given how the documentary is so fractured in its focus of the building.
Also yes, like Beeswax, many of the files were lost in the computer switch, hence the red. That’s actually a bit of a blow in this case, as it makes it harder for me to ever make small tweaks to this project down the line. Guess it’s pretty set in stone.
