MST 230: Online Media Production Two

'The Digital Producer' Readings

WEEK 9 & 10: INTERVIEWS

Producing is an art, not a science. And much of the art is learned by trying things out, experimenting, making mistakes and learning from them, reading about what's happening in the industry... and talking to peers.

Barbara Holecek

Barbara Holecek is an independent documentary producer, direc-tor, and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts; she is also a member of the Filmmakers Collaborative, a nonprofit group of inde-pendent filmmakers. She has produced many programs for UNICEF and the PBS series, NOVA, including the award-winning films, "The Business of Extinction" and "Doctors of Nigeria." Holecek recently wrote "Hopes on the Horizon" for Blackside, Inc. (Boston, Massa-chusetts), and she is currently developing a series, "Voices from Africa," consisting of audiovisual oral histories for schools and archives.

Digital Producer: Can you describe your process of logging?

Barbara Holecek: Logging with the MediaLog system is fabulous for me; it was actually a huge breakthrough. When I was working in film or linear editing, a production assistant used to do the logging; now I do it myself. This is how the process works: a production assis-tant or I takes minimal logs while we're shooting. After the shoot, I rent a 3/4-inch deck or a VHS editing deck and sit and look at every frame. It may take me two weeks or more to log the footage in MediaLog if I've shot around 30 hours of footage. But by the end, I have a fairly good idea of what the rough assembly is going to be. So by the time I get into the edit room, I really remember almost every single shot, the way an editor would. This has cut down enormously the amount of time I spend preplanning or driving an editor crazy by not knowing what I'm going to do.

DP: When you do the assembly, do you order the shots?

BH: Yes. I'll say, "Assemble shots 1, 10, 11, 35, 3, 86, 4." And then I'll usually leave the editor alone with the footage for a while in order to become familiar with it. I guess the reason I let the editor sit alone for that length of time, even during the assembly (although I may come in and say, "How's it going?") is that I want the person to have a sense of ownership of the footage. I don't particularly want to be looking over the editor's shoulder at the beginning. As the editor begins to see the logic of what I'm doing, and develops her or his own relationship to the footage, it's fine with me if he/she wants to change what I'm suggesting. Then I come in as soon as it's assembled.

DP: Before working in a nonlinear video editing environment, you edited either film or with linear video editing systems. What's differ-ent about digital nonlinear editing?

BH: It provides the best combination of video and film. I hated video editing when it was linear. I loved film editing. You just go to where you want to go, and cut. It was still a very arduous process, but at least you could do all the "real" editing, the fine tuning. And that is very difficult with linear editing, very irritating for everybody, because it takes so long to run through the footage and make changes. With nonlinear editing you have little digital pieces that are essen-tially like little rolls of film, and you just cut. And this allows you to do it even faster. But it also allows you to do what you can do with linear video, which is to keep various versions. It's like the best of both worlds. If you're not sure, you can keep three versions of some-thing, which in film you can't. Several times in film, I've been through the nightmare of doing something that ultimately did not work in the whole film, having to go back, put all the little tiny, tiny, tiny pieces of film back together again, reconstruct the entire scene the way it was originally shot, and re-edit it. And that is horrific. I don't need to do that any more. You can actually say, "Let's try it this way." If you have the time and the money, a digital editing system gives you the ultimate luxury in how you're going to think.

BH: I like digital cameras; I think they're great. But I think it has made camera work often kind of lazy, because you can just endlessly practice and rehearse on camera. When you shot on film, you had 10 minutes to shoot usually if it was in documentary; you couldn't look at the footage after it was shot. That was both very bad and very good. If the director and cameraperson were good at what they were doing, it was very good, because you had to be so precise, you already kind of focused yourself, narrowed yourself, disciplined yourself to make sure you would get the shot. So you had camerapeople who were utterly supreme, and directors who really watched what they were doing.

Yolanda Parks

Yolanda Parks is an independent producer/writer, and owns her own company, Dauphin Street Productions, in Los Angeles, Califor-nia. She produces documentaries and documentary-style programs for both broadcast and non-broadcast venues. Among the programs she has produced is "A Delicate Balance," an episode of Break-Through: The Changing Face of Science in America for Blackside, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts. Digital Producer: How would you compare working in a linear ver-sus nonlinear editing environment? Yolanda Parks: I spent most of my career working in the linear world. It gave me a lot of discipline in terms of being able to make decisions quickly, and knowing that I couldn't change my mind with-out a major hassle, and that was good. But coming over to nonlinear has just been amazing -- it gives you a lot of freedom, and the ability to really go in and change things. I think it's made me a much better, more creative producer.

DP: How do you find an editor you want to work with?

YP: I look at a lot of his or her work, and sit down and talk with them. You know, sometimes it comes across in the interview. If somebody's just talking about, "Yeah, the new model can do this, this fast," that's a signal. I try to get back to talking about story, and show-ing examples, and saying, "How do you feel about this," or "What do you think the cutting was like here," or "How would you change this?" I try to talk a lot about story and content and timing, and just the beauty of editing and making a piece that tells you something. I find that if you talk to people long enough and ask them the right ques-tions, and get them to explain the way they like to cut, then hopefully you can see where they're coming from, if it's more from a technical point of view or a more artistic one. Ultimately I prefer working with editors who have both skills. I appreciate technical skills because if the Avid goes down, it's frustrat-ing when the editor doesn't understand what's going on. So the answer is really a matter of finding the right balance.

Steve Stone

Steve Stone is a Senior Producer/Director at Creative Video Design and Production in Medfield, Massachusetts. He produces and directs corporate videos in scenario-based and documentary styles. Some of his clients include the Greater Boston YMCA, TJX Corporation, Allied Domecq (Dunkin' Donuts), BJ's Wholesale Club, and The Greeley Education Company.

Digital Producer: I understand you create a project book for each of your video programs. Let me ask you to describe how you create and use it.

Steve Stone: For all of my shows, I create a project book using a 3-ring binder. This book becomes my bible for all aspects of pre-pro-duction, the shoot, the edit and any re-edits or revisions. When the script is finished, I take the script file and using the computer I break the script down, giving every scene a number. The first scene is 01, the next 02, and so on. A scene is often defined by a change in loca-tion, but it may also be a different camera setup in the same location. I give each scene its own page to help me establish a shooting order when we're in pre-production and to easily switch scenes around if there are any last minute changes. If it's a scenario-based program where I'm probably going to shoot a master and reversals, then I'll put all those scene numbers on the same page. For example, the mas-ter will be scene 24, and the reversals will be 24A and 24B.

DP: How do you log interviews?

SS: For the Greater YMCA show that we just did, which consisted of interviews and B-roll, we shot about ten interviews. I had prepared roughly 10 to 15 questions ahead of time. During the interview I would slate the question number before asking the question, so I can hear it when I'm logging. This can be extremely helpful. When I log an interview-style program, I use three columns: Name for the person's name, Scene for the question number, and Comments for a very shorthand version of what was said. So now you can sort the clips in two ways: by scene, which would be all the content grouped together, or by name, which is all the people I interviewed. DP: What do you do if you have B-roll and you're not sure where it will go? SS: For a documentary-style program I'll also log the B-roll using three columns: Name, Scene, and Comments. Under Name I'll iden-tify the shot as B-Roll.01, B-Roll.02, etc. Under Scene, I'll try to place the shot in a basic category. Under Comments,

Rebecca Miller

Rebecca Miller has been producing programs since 1985. She founded Rebecca Miller Productions in 1992 (in Newton, Massachu-setts), where she functions as Producer/Director/Designer/Editor of broadcast and non-broadcast video programs. Miller has worked for a long list of clients including: NBC Cable and International, Carib-iner Communications, Jack Morton Productions, Panasonic, Digital, and the PBS series Talking with David Frost. Miller recently created a video wall for Nortel Networks. She specializes in high-end pro-grams featuring original creative ideas, well designed graphics and animation, editing, and music tracks chosen to surprise the viewer. She edits on a Media 100 system.

Digital Producer: You were a freelance producer until fairly recently; now you have your own company and produce and edit your projects. How much experience did you have as an editor before working in nonlinear editing?

Rebecca Miller: I did very little analog editing or film editing before I started editing on the Media 100. I never really considered myself an editor; if nonlinear editing had not come along, I wouldn't be editing; it's far too frustrating and not nearly as rewarding. But nonlinear editing has allowed me to do things which I would not have done otherwise. As a freelance producer, I worked all over the country, in fact, all over the world, and I worked with some of the best editors in the world. I really learned a lot from all of these guys, but I was always telling them, "Please trim five frames here," or "Give me a ten-frame dissolve here." Once I started editing, I realized that I was able to do myself all of those things that I had been talking to other guys about and the tricks that I had learned from them.

RM: My goal is to digitize as quickly as possible. It's a very time-consuming process that I always feel is a big waste of time. Sometimes I sit down with a box of forty tapes; it could take me weeks to go through it if I let it. People often go out and shoot this bad, smeary DVCam, like "garbage-cam," and then they hand me boxes of hour-long reels which may have a twenty-frame gem in the middle of it. I get stuck with this stuff constantly, so my goal is to just speed through as much as possible.

Tim Mangini

Tim Mangini is the Production Manager for the FRONTLINE tele-vision series on PBS; FRONTLINE airs 30 hours of documentaries each season from its WGBH offices in Boston, Massachusetts. Mangini is in charge of a small staff that onlines and packages each weekly program on Avid Media Composers. The offline edit is gener-ally performed in an outside facility, arranged by the individual show's independent producer.

Digital Producer: How would you characterize the advantages of a nonlinear online?

Tim Mangini: Number one is just having everything in one digital nonlinear format, coming from a variety of different places into one packaging suite. The elements of every FRONTLINE include the doc-umentary itself, which is onlined nonlinearly; the packaging elements such as the FRONTLINE logo and lower third IDs; and any opening and closing PBS elements that have to be added. Having all of the ele-ments in one digital nonlinear format allows us to work with them in a more seamless way, making it easier to package the program. Another advantage is that it is much easier getting the show to time. All of our hour-long shows have to be exactly 56 minutes and 46 sec-onds. When you're in a linear online, you get to the end and find out you're 15 frames long or 20 seconds short. You have to figure out where to make the edits, and you make compromises, because you don't want to re-lay the whole show. So a great advantage is that it allows you to move things around easily.

DP: What percentage of the shots would you say need color cor-recting? TM: Almost 100 percent. There's hardly a shot that we don't touch. Some of those changes are quite minute, or are done for technical rea-sons rather than aesthetic reasons. Occasionally we'll say, "Oh, it's just right." But in any given show, we have anywhere between 200 and 500 tapes, and we're taking a number of clips or images from those tapes. Maybe there's a few times that we don't touch a shot. Now, there are times where producers come in, and they feel very strongly, "I don't want you to touch that. The way I shot it is the way I want it." Sometimes the creative decision-making process affects what the look should be, because obviously a look is very subjective. We have a look at FRONTLINE that we have the shows mold to. But if a producer has a particular vision, then we go with that vision. As long as I feel it will still fit within the FRONTLINE standards, that's fine with me.

The Digital Producer - CD ROM Readings for MST 230