Following a Transcript | Workshop

We had a workshop with someone in the industry called, Tim Bentham, and he talked to us about the use of a transcript.

Definition

• A transcript is a written or printed copy of something that has previously been said.

Why are Transcripts useful?

• By writing a transcript of the audio from the original footage of a documentary, it will be helpful when editing the video.
• When the transcript is written, you can read through it and cross out/delete the parts of audio that you don't want or is un needed within the documentary. Then when it comes to editing, you know what parts of audio to cut out and what parts to keep in the video.
• Once you a have rough idea of what audio clips you want in the video you can focus on cleaning up the audio and then you can add in cutaways to hide the cuts you have made previously.

The Task

• With this information, we were given a transcript with some of the sentences crossed out, indicating the fact that they should be cut out. We were given the interview clips and some of the cutaways for the interview, and we were told to create the video from the transcript.
• The first thing I did was find the correct interview clip. Once I found this I cut out the parts that were un wanted and made sure that the sentences I was left with made sense. I then cleaned up the audio by using the 'Constant Power' effect, also by adjusting the audio on the clips.
• Once this was cleaned up, I added some of the cutaways to hide the cuts that were made. When choosing what cutaways to add, it was a hard decision as it needed to make sense with the audio. When you hear something you want to see it as well, which is something that I took on board with this edit.

What I've Learnt

• From doing this workshop I have learnt that writing a transcript for our documentary will be useful when starting the edit. The interviews that we have shot are very long and there is quite a lot of information that we don't need to show within the documentary. 
• If we write transcripts of these interviews, we can easily locate the different topics being said, and we can decide on paper what we want said and what we don't want said.
• I've also learnt that everything that is being heard through the audio needs to be seen through the pictures.
• Another aspect I have learnt is the fact that documentaries are mostly made up of cutaway and GV shots. This is useful information to have as we now know to film more GV's in order to create a smooth and interesting documentary.