Organizing Your Footage by Theme

I teach my documentary film students at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley several techniques for organizing their footage.

I’d like to share one of those tips here.

First, create a “+Master Clips” bin for all the clips you have ingested. The “+” will send the bin to the top of your browser, so you can easily find it.

Next, create one bin called “Interviews” and another bin called “Themes”.

Each of these two bins will contain sub-bins. The “Interview” sub-bins will be labeled by the name of the person interviewed. The “Themes” sub-bins will be named by the various topics that make up your film’s ideas.

Next, create subclips from your master clips.  Make one subclip for every soundbite or idea.

Then put the appropriate subclip in the appropriate “Interview” sub-bin. Are you still with me?

For example, let’s say that you have a subclip, which is a soundbite from John Brown about his prediction that interest rates will rise. You will put the subclip in the “John Brown” bin.

Next, duplicate the subclip and put the copy in the appropriate “Themes” sub-bin. Perhaps in a documentary about the pending collapse of the stock market, the sub-bin is labeled “Inflation.”

Having duplicate copies of sub clips in the correct sub-bins helps you to easily find your footage and structure your documentary film.

For more information on how to structure your documentary, please check out my online E-course, “Editing the Character-Driven Documentary” at https://newdocediting.com/land/editingdocumentaryecourse/