Montage

I believe my 30 second montage captured everything about the Survivor style along with the ncessary information for external audiences to understand the video’s concept and roots. My research into the Jamboree could partially be found here but not in as much depth as will be used later in the Pilger documentary. All of the footage in this section, besides the two gogglebox behind the scenes shots, was archival footage from news and the after movies. 

Graphics

Next, I didn’t spend too long on the graphics as this was only going to be a test pilot and I needed to focus on the footage and messaging. I went with a Survivor font downloaded online and used a simple lighting effect on each name to make it glow, giving the video depth. As well as the Survivor font, I wanted to make it feel like the Gogglegonks series could go in different directions in terms of subject matter so inserted a neutral ‘Gonk’ font as a baseline. 

(Gogglegonks is a play on Gogglebox but inserting my own branding)

music

When it came to music, rather than a tribal island track found in Survivor, I wanted to connect the music back to Korean culture, using a piece of traditional music. This is accented by the heavy drum beat and gong crash to give the video momentum and dramatize it further. 

tie in to video

Finally, when the cast are shown on screen, rather than displaying them on the Jamboree as initially planned, I needed to tie this clip to the rest of the Gogglebox episode so manipulated footage from our filming days. Each household is represented by a different colour, much like tribes in Survivor, and the footage is slowed to add dramatics once more.

Overview and problems

Overall, I was very happy with this opening clip as it is faithful to my style and technical research while giving my own flavour and depositing important information to the viewer that the audience will need. However, I wasn’t particularly happy with my voice over. Due to my unpreparedness for it by drawing up a script in this stage, I didn’t worry about mic levels and general sound quality. I fear this may be a theme in this stage of development due to the time limit before deadline. In future I should work more closely on my scripting and voice over early on. 

The next stage of editing I chose to do was the Gogglebox/ Gogglegonks main video. I wanted this to be the length of half a TV show slot so got the video to 11 and a half minutes. In cable TV, a 30 minute slot would be 22 minute program plus adverts. In that time, I only cover 3 of the slides from the presentation I showed the interviewees. 

Archetypes and runtime

Over the 11 minutes, I wanted to establish a setup for a series along with longer talks with the cast and impliment a few stylistic choices of my own. I wanted the edit to frame each cast member as a character with an archetype, as seen on tv shows like this, with Abi becoming a chatterbox, Heather’s deep pan expressions and Millie always double checking her facts. This gives each person a story to tell in their way to engage the viewer. 

sound and graphics

The whole episode only took a few hours to edit as I’d already mulitcamed and marked each of the interviews to make it easy to find information. I had the same voice over issue as with the Survivor portion and that VT blended really well into the more comfortable style. Throughout, the font remained the ‘Gonk’ typeface to decrease the drama of the titles back to reality. I designed it this way as the intro is a dramatised version of the Jamboree, much like in the news and the standard perception whereas the rest of the video is a more relaxed take representing what was really going on. 

As mentioned when multicam editing, I discovered that the sound on Zach's house sounded tinny and this became apparent compared to the others however it was too much hassle on a tight deadline to go back through the original interview to change. I am grateful to Mattie for recording sound in person for this project. 

Demographic appeal

An issue I found was that it became a welcoming program to any Jamboree participants (or parents/ those looking to go in the future) which was my target audience but isolates a wider understanding. To solve this problem, I added in sections called speedruns to catch a casual viewer up on what is being discussed. A part from that, I believe this is faithful to my target demographic. 

relevance

In hindsight, this is a distraction from my main Pilger documentary that wouldn’t have warranted all of my pages of research alone. I thought I may submit only this but that removes the relevance of a majority of my research. If I were to do this again, I would edit an episode 3 or 4 in this series as these would be about the main Jamboree, which my research is based on. I would also only stick to one video but at this stage I’ve tied my own hands due to the level of previous work I have put in. 

Cutting Down

Moving on, I took my premixed multicam interviews from earlier and a collection of news footage to pace between my narrations. Some of this narration was also carried out through voice over to blend the talking head with interview and archive footage. It very quickly became apparent that a majority of interview footage would not be used in this edit, cutting many down from over 10 minutes to mere seconds. This was so that I could represent everyone interviewed, presenting the breadth of this operation though only through a small lens. 

Proof of Concept

The video I was editing is called a ‘Proof of Concept’, testing the waters on the idea and getting an overall vision to pitch the production further. The rest of this portfolio goes along with that in saying should this version be received well the research and footage is already captured to take it to the next stage. Due to this, I wanted to highlight as many points as possible in a short space of time, making it easier for moderation with a 14 minute cut rather than over an hour feature film. Unfortunately, this meant sacrificing many interesting conversations in interviews but made me focus on my editing to find the best content to represent them. You can find all the multicamed interviews above.

Graphics

Additionally, I needed to have graphics. Pilger sticks to white text on black so to keep things simply I did just that. However, I did originally find the white text too plain and difficult to find clearly so incorporated a black drop shadow for further depth. 

Following the graphics, the video was missing sound diversity. I went back to Pilger’s work to find a common theme in music, rediscovering the dramatic thuds for title cards and heavy inspirational music to accompany narration. These act as a nice counterbalance from my constant droning voice. To fix that issue, I may ask around for a narrator in the full version (maybe even a group of narrators to secure my own style).

Sound

Continuing with sound, an issue I only realized after exporting was the levels of audio. The in person interviews needed to be bought up as many are too quiet compared to the calls and my narration. This can be easily fixed in future but I wanted to stick with this export for FMP as a major first try. I am grateful to Mattie for joining me on the in person interviews as the sound quality is professional.

Content

A final area of discussion is the content covered. In order to explore all my research topics, I broke the video up into signposted sections. I leaned heavily on gender roles rather than scouting history as a whole to promote a major point of the documentary, keeping it relevant to the topic by including Matt discussing gender balance in the Jamboree unit. Later on, when discussing the history of Jamborees, I chose to include a montage of every Jamboree event badge which originally was planned as part of a Babylon style montage. However, I thought at this point there were too many styles at play and that remained the least necessary.