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:

1) 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.

2) 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.

3) 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.

How to divide the shoot into scenes
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) Begin cutting up each hour-long tape into smaller segments of roughly 1 to 15 minutes in length. Sleeping tapes can be left in their entirety as hour-long scenes. This division process is obviously subjective, but basically the key is to never make a cut in the middle of someone speaking, and to cut the scenes in a way that divides up the shoot into discrete segments which will allow people to watch them in small segments, make comments about each segment, and jump to the parts of the day that interest them based on tags and descriptions.

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. See here for more details.

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"

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 here or via our discussion group.