Ate Logo Mama

A friend I made during my FCP course last year contacted me recently and asked if id like to be involved in an editing job. He was leaving the job due to gaining employment elsewhere yet had done all of the ground work leaving final editing left to be done.

I took up the opportunity in order to create a few more contacts and stretch my editing skills. After viewing the footage it was apparent the enormity of the work that had been done previously in simply capturing and laying out a rough cut. There were 60 tapes recorded and a large number of archived files and images. 

My task is to bring the rough edit into a final piece. Although the foundations were laid and it looked like a fairly straight forward task it has become quite challenging to go through, not that that puts me off at all, i've found it very interesting.

The documentary is about the life and history of Samora Machell, the first president of Mozambique who was killed in an aeroplane crash in 1986 that was never explained. The documentary features key political members from the time, close friends of Samora and his widow Mama Graca Machell, now married to Nelson Mandella.

The process of editing on my own projects has normally involved working either on my own or with one other person after filming together and constructing the concepts and ideas together.

For this project I was arriving half way through and into a subject I was completely unfamiliar with. As well as that, there is a very large percentage of the documentary spoken in Mozambican and Portugese. I have a translater available to me and will eventually need to subtitle everything. The biggest challenge is refining the whole documentary directly alongside its creator.

 
My input is welcomed very much in every aspect of the project, and seeing it with 'fresh eyes' enables me to be more constructive and opinionated. I feel I do spend a lot of time explaining what and why I request to do certain things and have often chagned things drastically back and forth to demonstrate the effect of certain editing techniques, or just simply changing the narrative slightly in places so that it fits better to a viewer who may not be very familiar with the subject. 

However, the creator of the piece has worked through the entire documentary from start to finish, when one is so involved in a project it is easy to try and 'over edit', this is really what I feel is the most difficult thing in honest. In a sense I am employed by this person to edit his work and follow his instructions, and despite his PhD and indepth knowledge of the subject, there have been occasions where I have had stop and discuss particular ideas and put forward my feelings that certain things may be 'too much'. Luckily I dont see this as such a bad thing, the experience itself has been invaluable, all of my opinions seem to be highly regarded and so far every discussion has been discussed, each idea tried and tested and an outcome agreed. 

Mentally it has been challenging yet very interesting in working in this manner as I have not had to do this to such a level in recent months. Currently the documentary has had its first half hour completed and there are a further 20-30minutes left to do. Ultimately the plan is to take the documentary to festivals and be credited for them, any money made has also been offered to myself although nothing is on paper yet. At the moment I see this as an opportunity to gain some experience and credit whilst making new contacts of which I do hope to work with again in the future.