Editing the first episode of ‘West Bancroft Side Story’

So far in this column, I've talked about choreography, filmography, the plot, the actors and even the casting process itself. It sounds like it might be a completed project, right?

Wrong – at least for a filming project.

Over spring break, several members of UTTV took scenes from West Bancroft Side Story on portable hard drives to begin the most time-consuming part of production: the editing process.

The team members use a computer program called Final Cut Pro to edit video. Final Cut Pro, a Macromedia software application which is designed for professional film productions as well as independent projects, is one of the most flexible video editing programs available.

I joined Carina Cornieles, producer for WBSS, to work on editing several scenes – including singing scenes – during break.

Since I have never used Final Cut Pro, only Final Cut Express, a condensed version of the program. Cornieles gave me a crash course, showing me shortcuts and other simple tricks for the program.

After that, we were off.

On our first day working, we focused on editing the scenes that included songs. Editing a scene with a song is different from a regular scene because of the lip-synching.

I know what you're thinking: "Lip-synching? How lame." For a musical program, though, lip-synching is one of the only ways to assure the sound recording is good quality. It would be nice to hear a live version of a song, but it really is better to record the song first so it sounds just the way it needs to.

Still, lip-synching makes editing just that much harder, because the movement of people's mouths should match the words of the music.

One of the most difficult songs to edit film for was the song "Fire Burning," the biggest choreographed song of the musical. This scene was difficult mainly because the match of the song and the choreography had to be so exact, but editing the musical portions of the show is my favorite part.

But here is the bad part about my enthusiasm: during editing, I would sometimes become overly excited about the video and spend too much time watching raw footage instead of working.

Raw footage – the video files from the camera – is interesting to watch. Watching the raw footage is ultimately what makes editing take up so much time.

When we sat down, we had 20 hours of footage to examine; after picking out the pieces we wanted to use for the video, the result was 20 minutes of video. That's one hour of total filming for every one minute in the final project. It may sound outrageous, but it's a fairly standard ratio.

Some raw footage includes mistakes, like when one of the actors accidentally pulled the microphone cord and yanked the camera into a strange position.

The most interesting parts of looking at raw footage, though, have to do with the odd consistency the actors have, which leads to different takes having almost exactly the same timing, which I noticed when Cornieles and I worked on a few major dialog scenes from episodes one and two.

Editing dialog is very different from editing musical sections, which is the type of editing I am used to. Editing for dialog involves using several different camera angles to get exactly what's needed for the scene, which can mean moving the order of different clips.

Another aspect of editing a dialogue scene is the variety of takes available for use. In one scene, our biggest problem was that we wanted to use two different takes to get different angles, but the actor was positioned in a different way in all three takes.

While filming will wrap at the end of the month, editing will continue throughout March and possibly even the beginning of April, since less than half of the show has been edited.

But don't worry: West Bancroft Side Story is slated to premiere its first episode April 9 on UT's on-campus channel, Channel 31, as well as on UTTV's YouTube channel.