This document is an editing diary detailing the process of editing a documentary over several weeks. It describes tasks like creating a rough cut, finishing the opening sequence which involved stop motion animation, adjusting audio levels on interviews, replacing poor quality footage with new recordings, and adding titles and music. Issues that came up included footage not fitting frames properly and backgrounds interfering with text readability. The diary shows iterative improvements were made such as adjusting interview spacing and using effects to balance audio volumes.

1. Editing Diary
06/01/14 Today, i went through all the footage to start
creating a rough cut of the whole
documentary before actually editing it
properly. I’ve found that some of the footage
isn’t as good compared to others, which will
show a lack of professionalism within the
whole piece. Therefore, the poor footage
will be recorded within this week or next.
07/01/14 I carried on with the rough cut today and
finished it so that I was able to edit the
documentary properly. As I was able to
finish the documentary, I have begun doing
the edit decision list.
09/01/14 Today, I have been putting together the
opening sequence of the stop motion
pictures I did at home over the Christmas
holidays. I did this with my own camera, so
when I’ve come to editing, it doesn’t fit the
frame, this is quite an issue as I’m having to
resize all the images and they aren’t all
perfectly the same making it become a little
jumpy. Hopefully not enough to notice too
much.
10/01/14 Today, I’ve been carrying on with the
opening sequence editing. I’ve booked out
cameras for the other two in my group to
hopefully go out recording next week for the
footage that isn’t the best quality compared
to others.
13/01/14 Today, I’ve spent the lesson doing the
opening sequence. It wouldn’t take as long if
I’d have used a college camera, but this is
something to learn from in future. I’ve
almost finished it, it should only take one

2. more hour or so. I will carry on with this after
I’ve finished in college as I don’t want it to
effect the amount of editing I’ve done as it is
a time consuming task currently.
14/01/14 I finished the opening sequence yesterday
evening after college, so today I was able to
proceed editing the rest of the documentary.
I perfected the voxpops for the opening
sequence before the stop motion that took a
while to do. And I’ve been downloading the
music for the opening sequence ready for
when I get back to editing tomorrow.
15/01/14 Today I have added the music to the opening
sequence. I found a fair few different ‘well-
known’ songs of Britain to relate to the topic
and title, and I found that ‘Rule Britannia’
was the best one to choose as I got a few
people to listen to them all and choose
which would be best.
I also, started cutting and changing around
interviews, voxpops and cut aways to make
the documentary flow better.
16/01/14 Today I carried on editing; cutting different
parts to make them increasingly
professional and perfected. I got through a
good amount of editing today.
17/01/14 Carried on with editing today. Cut the
archive footage that wasn’t correctly cut in
the place that me and my group wanted it to
be and made sure the timing of it was good.
20/01/14 Today, I’ve gone through more of the simple
editing such as cutting footage to be timed
correctly and made sure the place that
footage was in, looked good and made
sense.
21/01/14 Today, I decided to add a few titles to the
interviews. I came across an issue that

3. because of the variety of different colours in
some backgrounds, the text wasn’t clear
enough in any colour. To overcome this
issue, I decided to change the initial plan of
the interview layout, and put a box behind
the titles for the interviews. I did it so that it
was slightly transparent so that the
audience could still see the whole frame of
the footage.
23/01/14 Today, I did some more editing and did a few
more titles. Nothing new.
24/01/14 Today people in my group went out to film
more footage to replace the footage that
wasn’t good enough to be in a ‘professional’
documentary. I carried on with the editing,
and I found some of the sound on interviews
was much quieter or louder than others, I
had to adjust volumes to keep the
documentary flowing well.
27/01/14 Today, I did some more editing. I also
changed a few interviews around so that
they made more sense and weren’t as close
together.
28/01/14 Today I added the footage that was re-done.
It was better than the original one that we
did therefore improves our work. I cut the
footage and put them in the correct place. I
also added titles and banners to the new
footage as some were interviews.
30/01/14 The editing needs to be better I think. I’ve
changed a few interview clips so that it’s not
just the person talking straight away, there
is a ‘breathing gap’, maybe just one second,
but it spaces the interviews out and makes
them flow a lot more smoothly.
31/01/14 Today I’ve used the effect ‘fill left’. This is for
sound on the interviews, as the volume

4. wasn’t and this was the correct tool to edit it
with. I went through every interview and
used this.
03/02/14 This is probably the last week of editing.
Today, I’ve found the music that were using
in the documentary during the cut aways
and voice over. It’s a sandwich song found
on youtube.
04/02/14 Today I’ve inserted the sandwich song into
the editing process and cut the areas where
it didn’t need to be using the razor tool.
02/02/14 The editing is pretty much done now. I will
spend this week looking for areas of
improvements for the editing so that we can
have the best possible piece of work.