Editing preparedness

It's late Sunday night, early Monday morning and while sleep would be a natural enterprise in which to be currently engaged, it seems to be fleeting at the moment, thus, a blog entry.

Tomorrow (well, technically today), we begin preparing the studio for a four week editing session for the musician documentary we have been working on over the last year. It would be lovely to state the name of said musician, but we've been kindly asked to refrain from doing so. 

Our preparations include organizing the over four (4) terabytes of footage we've acquired over the last twelve (12) months (that's 300GB/month to you and me) into easily accessible, well-tagged batches (technically folders and files with a pile of meta-data attached) and having the last four or five interviews transcribed. There will also be a passel of audio-syncing to complete as a number of our filming escapades involved multiple cameras and double-system sound - though it's a tedious process, it's actually one I find quite meditative. Though I wonder if Brian, who will actually be doing the audio-syncing, will find it so. 

Once the project is prepared for editing we'll have a spate of long, fun, quirk-filled, idea-tossing (and did I say long) meetings to discuss a general structure for the film and identify its specific theme set and feel. Actually, much of that was done at the start of the project and with the mid-project production of a rough-cut, but it's good to do this step on a regular basis as sometimes these bits shift during production and identifying that shift and incorporating it into the finished film is often a good thing. And sometimes simply necessary.

Let the preparations begin! Well, let them begin tomorrow (today) after a bit of rest.

Change...

We are nothing if not the sum of our changes. So here we are nearing the end of twenty-fourteen and already the change has begun. What sort of change? The long answer is, well, rather too long to go into at the moment. But the short answer is: lots. There is much change afoot at goodfocus.

In that light, perhaps it's good to briefly mention what is not changing. We will continue to produce films for the underserved communities in which we live and work. We will continue to tell good stories about good people and good organizations within those communities. We will continue to find inspiration in the amazing thoughts, words and works of the incredible people and organizations around us. 

As for the changing bit, well, it's already started and an example of it can be seen here in this new website. This site hasn't seen a major update (well, truly not much of any sort of update) since the company started in 2007, so it's a bit overdue. And, in true goodfocus fashion, we're tossing aside the well-reasoned idea of building something complete and well-considered and instead bringing the new site into public view as it's being created - consider it a form of transparent web development. Or, a desire to tweak in real-time. Either way, this will be a work-in-progress and could be so for a very long time. Consider it a rough-cut.