Southamerikate Update 5.

Spanish.

This was my first experience of documentary making and so, whilst everything wasn’t completely new, there was a lot to learn. One of the biggest obstacles I encountered was trying to put together the story structure in editing whilst not understanding what the protagonist is actually saying.

Although I’ve never had specific issues learning languages while I was in school, for me learning Spanish was like pushing an incredibly heavy boulder uphill. In the beginning I tried really hard to try and get a grasp. It was simple to get the basics but once it got to use of tense and a need for a larger vocabulary I was really stuck. I would sit around when we were in busses or at lunch and repeat and repeat and repeat one phrase to try and remember. Never have I struggled so hard to remember. My brain is generally quite good at memory. I can reel off the roman emperors and recite poems but when it comes to rules such as maths equations or Spanish tense I struggle.

So when it came to editing I found I could barely even grasp the gist of what he was discussing. Our editor had equally poor Spanish and so we powered through with inaccurate summaries and guesswork. Luckily for the final part of editing we had a translator which really pulled it together. In some places we were pleasantly surprised by our accidental accuracies in other places we found what we’d edited frankly didn’t make sense.

Given that we managed to pull together a documentary in a language we had very little knowledge of the language I’m feeling really positive for next semesters Film TV documentary.