From the course: Avid Media Composer: Documentary Editing

Interpreting a creative brief to establish goals - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Avid Media Composer: Documentary Editing

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Interpreting a creative brief to establish goals

Embarking upon the art of documentary editing is definitely an exciting and challenging task. Just as with other type of video projects, documentaries can run the gamut of content, style, and perspective, but all share the common goal of recording real events, hopefully by revealing an intimate look into the worlds of people and places. Specifically, our task through this course is to approach a project from start to finish. Analyzing goals and evaluating our raw materials, then fashioning a game plan in order to prepare our project, and cut a solid rough cut, and then craft a meticulous fine cut through a thorough review process, and then deliver a product that ultimately pleases our client. This project called the Farm to Table Project will be a short documentary of around five to six minutes, on the practice and delivery of sustainable agriculture in the Santa Barbara, California region. We'll be following one farmer, BD Dautch, along with the people in his life as he explains to us why local farming is so important. Our client, the Mayor of Santa Barbara, has delivered to us a Creative Brief, which is a basic summary of the client's desired message for this piece. So, let's take a look at this Creative Brief. Now, you can find the entire Creative Brief in the exercise files that come with this title, if you're a lynda.com subscriber, and I'll put a bit of it up on screen here. But we won't read the entire thing, rather I'd like to draw out some key points to talk about, quickly, becoming the focal point of a movement that merges ideas from agriculture, cuisine, and ecology. Now, here we're getting the main thesis of the piece, explaining the major areas we'll be exploring in our documentary. Shoppers looking to support area growers, help the environment by reducing the need for shipping. Now, here we're delving into the importance of local growing, one of the preeminent messages of this growing movement. Chefs and restaurants looking for a way to distinguish their offerings while providing flavor and nutrition are turning to local organic growers. All right, so here we're going beyond the grower/consumer component and are talking about restaurants. Getting across the point that this movement isn't just for the common consumer is important for our client. And the Farm To Table Project aims to support this movement towards locally grown, ecologically sustainable produce by promoting key local growers and the weekly farmers market. And here we're focusing on the importance of the Farmer's market itself. There will be a lot of great footage of the Farmer's market, so it promises to be a fun scene to edit. But we are also tasked with the job of showing how important it is to the Farm To Table movement. So as you can see, we have about 5 or 6 minutes to find an interesting, educational, and creative way to focus our piece on these important points. We'll have many tools in our arsenal, everything from interviews, to video footage, to still images, to graphics, to music, the list goes on. We'll have to take a look at these assets and our project goals in order to help start the process of defining exactly how we'll go about editing our documentary.

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