Today has been a day filled with new words, new people and new skills; I have learnt more in the past two days about editing than I have in my 5 years doing media studies… which shocked me for a number of obvious reasons. While I have tried throughout my education to pick up softwares such as final cut and premiere pro it has always been a struggle to hold onto what I have learnt… much like card games I learn something new and when it comes to putting into practice what I learnt, the next time its as if I had never learnt it in the first place; this has in the past left me feeling unmotivated and actually quite stupid. This time however I seemed to have held onto the information I learnt (I hope….) and this is possibly due to the fact that other people were counting on me to teach them what I knew. Last night we had to edit for a while in a quiet room in order for us to get our work done, this was tedious and annoying but I learnt a surprising amount from trial and error and watching maddy save the day (thank you again maddy you saaaaved our lives).

We got to the hotel early to find that only dennis was there, we toyed with he thought of waiting for the others so they could add their opinions on what we had produced over a coffee and biscuit then came to the conclusion that to wait for them would be an incredible waste of time so decided to crack on with fiddly and time consuming issues such as audio syncing, titles, backfround music and transitions. Everyone else in the group arrived 2 hours later than they had originally said they were going to, which actually, although rather annoying at the time, allowed us to have a more focused view point of the end product and allowed us a little unstressed time for tweaking.

We finished the documentary in what I would happily say was record time but again, encountered a number of technical issues which pushed our finish time back at least 2 hours. The first problem we faced was that for some unknown reason the material from the flip cam worked but as soon as we unplugged it, one of those pop up warning boxes that everyone loves popped up telling us that the files were pending; we decided to do as the ostrich do in this instance and stick our head in the metaphorical sand until maddy came to the rescue, cape and all! We then encountered sound issues as the soundtrack the participants wanted was quite loud and davids VO was quite quiet; here we spent a considerable amount of time playing with audio levels and track highlights until the footage made audible sense. Exporting then took up a large chunk of the day because none of us actually knew how to, again maddy came over to save the day along with sir roderick and collectively we managed to export it and uploadit to YouTube… Wrong might I add which then resulted in a blurry end product and a black border around the on screen image. All in all I have been incredibly impressed with the amount of work everyone has done on both sides, we all pulled together as a community to help eachother and had fun in the process; we have made new rafiki’s during our three short but packed days and.im proud of what we have achieved.