Eager to review the footage we captured from our last tutorial, Grace, Claudia and I visited the editing suites to begin our opening sequence. Here, we began to brainstorm different ways we could open our documentary, whether we wanted to adopt a humorous take, or stay true to our initial vision of an edgy albeit refined and sleek atmosphere. Many of us had conflicting opinions of how our opening sequence should unfold as this scene would ultimately set the tone of our overall documentary.
Workshopping our options we decided to go for the humorous take first in which we used the footage of the single skater skating uphill towards the camera, but later being interrupted by a tourist who inadvertently sabotaged our shot. Determined to use this clip as our opening sequence, we tried to find ways that could make the unplanned video-bombing of the tourist to look purposeful or at the very least, humorous. We did this by having serene music playing while the subject skates towards the camera and as soon as the lady enters our shot, we immediately disrupt the serenity of the scene by inserting a scratch-disk sound effect to further draw attention to the abruptness of the lady’s appearance while trying to do in a comedic way. After putting together a rough edit, Claudia raised the point that the schtick we were trying to incorporate was too juvenile for the overall sleekness that we were trying to convey for the rest of the documentary. Agreeing with Claudia, we needed to come to terms with the fact that we would need to reshoot. Here, it became clear that filmmaking often requires a lot of sacrifice, such as excluding a shot that you were once previously married to, and that flexibility and adapting to the circumstances is necessary when completing a documentary.
