Global Lives Post-Production Requirements

Post-Production is an essential part of the GLP process and will need to be done with the support of volunteers. In this section, describe who has committed to take part in the post-production process as a volunteer, how many hours they are willing to contribute to each stage, and the timeline for the completion of each stage.

Post-production must be completed in a maximum of 3 months after the shoot. The second installment of GLP funds will not be released until post-production is complete.

See the website below for a detailed description of the stages of the post-production process. For questions, please contact David Harris, as this stage is still being developed.

Post-Production for a Global Lives Project shoot consists of the following:

1. Creating an online photo album of stills from the shoot. This is important because everyone gets to see what you've got right away!

2. Contextual essay. Write a 2 to 4 page, double-spaced essay covering the subject's day, life story and important local, regional and national context issues that shape their life. This will be edited and posted on our website and used in our book and educational materials. This need not be a work of fine literature, as it will be edited and polished by other team members.

3. Watching the full 24 hours and dividing it into scenes. A scene can be anywhere from 5 minutes to a 8 hours in length and consists of an easily distinguishable section of the shoot. See below for details. These video files and the timeline containing scene divisions must then be compressed into a web format and uploaded or submitted on DVD to the GL coordinators. This can be done efficiently by volunteers dividing up the 24 hours and watching it after the shoot.

4. Producing a five-minute short from your shoot, using footage from the day and from the life story interview.* This will be put online in the Global Lives Library and be sold as a DVD with our books at the exhibits.

5. Transcribing, translating, and subtitling the full 24 hours and the life story recording.

6. Audio finishing for the full 24 hour shoot need only be done for situations where there are significant problems with the exposure or audio levels. These should be noted during the scene division process.

7. Putting together one giant file for use in the exhibit. This will come to about 300GB. This is not urgent, because as of yet, there is no good way for us to ship this amount of data internationally anyways. By late 2007, there should be 50GB DVDs and writers for these discs readily available, at which point we will be able to start moving these files around and preparing for our first exhibitions.

Dividing the shoot into scenes

Dividing the shoot into scenes is an important process that will facilitate greatly the rest of the post-production process.

Once the 24 hours have been divided into scenes, these scenes will form the basis of the post-production process, used in the following ways:


 * They will facilitate the production of the 5 minute summary video by providing the final editor(s) with a well-organized set of clips to work with.


 * They will be used to divide up the task of transcription, translation and subtitling of the full 24 hours, being distributed to volunteers who will handle these tasks.


 * They will be posted online, where people can post comments about each scene, rate them with a star system, tag them by themes and also based on what happens in each scene.

Step by step:

1. Create a timeline in your video editing program (Final Cut Pro or Premiere) with the full 24 hours in it. This will be the basis of your scene dividing and is important because the time code from this timeline will determine the timecode for each clip.

2. Cut the 24 hours up into scenes. A scene is a discrete portion of the person's day, divided either by changes in location or activity. Examples would be "walking to work," "breakfast," "soccer game," etc. Scenes can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. The sleeping portion of the day should be marked as one single scene. In the end, you will probably have between 20 and 50 scenes, depending on your subject's day and lifestyle and your editorial decisions.

3. As you divide up the shoot into scenes, build a spreadsheet where you note the following information:

a. filename - follow the format: ta01sc01 (ta stands for tape, sc for scene, zeros are important for ordering)

b. time in - based on 24 hour timeline

c. time out - "

d. spoken or not spoken - just a y/n to determine if the scene has anything in it that needs translating

e. description - one or two sentences describing what happens during the scene. Can be longer if necessary.

f. tags - keywords of phrases separated by commas that describe what happens during the scene that could be of use later in searching through the clips of this shoot as well as other shoots. Tags for the scene where Rael eats breakfast while listening to hip hop could include: "breakfast, corn flakes, milk, hip hop, Racionais MCs, banana, mango."

g. post-production needs - audio problems, serious color correction issues

For more information on tags, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags

This systematic effort will lay the groundwork for the Global Lives website and make the Global Lives 24 hour shoots accessible and searchable to anyone anywhere with a computer. If you have suggestions about how to make this system more effective or efficient, please share them.


 * Helio Ishii, Jarbas Viana and Ligia Romão think that the 5-minute pieces should only include footage from the 24 hour period, no voice overs, and should be in roughly chronological order w/o music. Dave thinks that it could be interesting to use narration from the life story interview to spice up the chronology of the day, but more importantly thinks that each team can decide this for themselves. Since Helio, Jarbas and Ligia are spearheading the 5 minute version in Brazil, Dave has told them to feel free to ignore his sentiments on the topic. 5 minutes is the only limit he insists on, and everyone agrees. What do YOU think? Click the edit button above and throw in your two cents here!

Chicago Media Works website on subtitling - A great resource for subtitling.