The last few months have had me working on the most recent interviews for the movie that I told about in the previous post. The interviews (over 50, so far), average 45 minutes to an hour each and require multiple steps to process, each of which take longer that the length of the interviews themselves.

First, I edit each one to remove extraneous footage, a lot of it consisting of production interruptions like taking a break to adjust a light or microphone, adjust camera settings, and change memory cards. Some of the interruptions are to just take a break to ask of the interviewee is cool enough, or needs a drink. And some of what gets cut is just small-talk type of chatter which occurs among the specific questions for the production.

After I have edited down each interview to it’s concise essence I send it off to a transcription service so that we can have a written version to highlight and make notes on/about when referring to each interview during the screenwriting process.

But, at this point, my job still isn’t done. A lot of the industry terms and names mentioned are unfamiliar to the transcriptionests. While they do their best to spell what they hear, I need to read through the first draft of each transcription to correct many of these “best guesses” so they can be found if we do a word search within the document. This oftentimes requires that I locate the spot in the recording where the error was made so that I can hear what was actually said – and this takes time. While I am going through the written transcripts I’m also making notes and highlighting sections which are useful for being included in the feature

I estimate that this entire process occupies most of a day’s worth of time for each interview. Multiply this times 50 interviews and ou have got nearly 2 months of works just to get the interviews distilled down to their useable content. And this doesn’t account for the other responsibilities I have at the office. That is not a complaint, as I enjoy it, even if tedious at times.

I’ve been noting some great comments about the supernatural and about belief systems, not only in the U.S, but also different cultures – very thought provoking content for the movie. This film should be very intriguing and relevant to a large percentage of the culture, today.

Stay tuned for more…

All His best,

Craig