Final Progress Report

When I first came back from China, I was not sure how I was going to put my documentary together. My friend, James, and I had been discussing the kind of themes we wanted to get across in the film and had planned out interview questions together. Still, the interviews with our Chinese subjects usually ended up being sprawling conversations, so I came home with a lot of interview material that I did not understand. After the lengthy process of capturing all the footage and transferring it to a separate hard drive to send to James, I realized there would not be enough time to make full transcripts of, and cut, the Chinese footage for the class. Without James, or some other patient and passionate Chinese speaker, to assist me, I would have to get by with the English language interviews. I watched them, subclipped them, and then watched them again and again. I laid out the interviews in a story and ended up with 40 minutes of solid interviews, which I then whittled down to 10 minutes. I whittled this down further and cut in some footage to illustrate the points being made. I had to rush through all this because James needed something to show to the University of South Carolina Honor’s College, which had given us a great deal of money to do the project.

I ended up with something that was not great. Still, if I had not been rushed I probably would have had that cut around this time instead of a month earlier. The piece was almost all backstory about the characters, but with enough missing to make it confusing. Only one character, James, had a proper arc. The other, Vaughn Anderson, a professional Mixed Martial Artist, was really just a complimentary character. A lot of the footage did not come together in coherent sequences, but was instead nice looking footage that had just been pieced together. Also, you had to wait until the very end to get the goal of the main character. So, yeah… there were problems.

In order to give it a stronger are and make it shorter, I decided to cut Vaughn. I added in material for James and restructured his story to give it a more traditional shape, with early established goals and obstacles, conclusions, the whole nine yards. The only problem was it was pretty boring. James had really enjoyed the first cut, but, when I pointed them out to him, could see the problems the class pointed out to me. When I sent him the transcript of the cut with him only, he was unenthusiastic. He was not rude, but he simply said there was a lot he missed from the old version. When I showed a cut to Diane, she had the same reaction. Really, when I thought about it, I had the same problems. I think I was just tired and wanted to have the structure settled on so bad I was willing to ignore my own doubt. The new version lacked the hook of the original cut’s beginning. Without Vaughn’s differing personality and attitude, James and the film lost some of its edge. Also, without the juxtaposition, some of the interesting notes about James – like his self-doubt – did not fit into the film. Diane suggested taking the original and the new cut and combining their strengths. She took out a piece of paper and helped map out Vaughn’s arc, and gave me ideas of how to more evenly structure their stories.

Getting to your finished product by creating three radically different versions of the story probably would not be the most practical way to go about doing a feature length doc with hundreds of hours of footage. For this project, though, that was exactly what I needed to do. I ended up with a product that I am very satisfied with. Well, the sound mix was not great. Not that my sound was great to begin with, but for all that was fixed, the quality of the interviews was degraded, and those are the most important part. I still have my original sound, and I think I will just use that – warts and all. I am very happy with the end product. I am even happier to be done with it, at least for now. I have to extend my deepest thanks to Diane, Kim, and everybody in the class for their honest criticisms and great suggestions.

By the way, the end title was “More Than Tourists,” though if I might still change it. I asked James to help me think of something else before the screening, but we could not come up with anything. He said he was not dissatisfied with the title, though ideally it would be something “more epic or threatening.”