3/31 Update

            We have made a decent amount of progress on the post-production of Greater Heights. We finished our assignment on color correction and color grading, which was easier than we expected. Our cinematographer already did a good job at white balance and eliminating the green fluorescent lighting of the gymnasiums, we just had to do some fine-tuning. We had a slight problem with the interviews, however, because the artificial light we brought was a bit warm on their faces, causing an orange glow. But through color correction and color grading, we were able to diminish some of the orange and make it seem a bit more natural.

            We also finished making most of our IndieGoGo site. All of the descriptions and perks of donating have been added; now we just need to make a trailer to make people want to donate. That’s where we are running into problems, we don’t know what track to take for our trailer. We were in the edit lab yesterday playing around with some ideas, but none of them seemed to cohere. Knowing that our IndieGoGo needs to be launched soon to make sure we get donations before we submit to festivals, we are running a bit on a deadline. Worst-case scenario we will just post a picture of our logo instead of a video, and hope that we get donations merely by word of mouth. Obviously that is not ideal, but with all our schoolwork and applying to jobs, it is hard to find free time to make an extra trailer, especially when we have no solid idea in mind. Hopefully after some hard brainstorming we can come up with a game plan and executing a trailer will become a lot easier.

Update 3/24

We finally were able to go into the edit lab! Levi and Emmie met up at the edit lab yesterday and went over a few of their sequences. So far we have four different sequences, covering battling different topics on parkour, including benefits, injuries, and expansion (through the Coastal Christian High School parkour club). Each of these sequences is about 3-4 minutes, already giving us 12 minutes of edited footage! All we have to do now is figure out what order we want our sequences to play in. After we compile all that, we will probably need to edit and cut out some of the b-roll. Since Levi and Emmie worked on these sequences separately, they have duplicated some b-roll. We as a team need to sit down once everything is in order, and figure out where repeated b-roll belongs.

The footage we have already edited into sequences does not even include the shadowing of parkour students. Unfortunately we are still trying to plan a day to film, which we can hopefully get nailed down by the end of this week. It will only take one day of filming, for probably about four hours or so. After that, we will be done filming and will be able to concentrate entirely on editing and distribution.

Weekly Update 3/17

What a stressful week it has been! It seems as though all our course work is due at once, which unfortunately has not given us a lot of time to edit this week. Last week, Levi worked on a sequence of Greater Heights focusing on the benefits children receive from taking a parkour class. Emmie made a short sequence on all the introductions of our main interview subjects, Tori, Anthony, and Yuri. Later this week, Emmie will focus her attention on creating a sequence about Yuri and how he is expanding the parkour class out of the gym. This will show Yuri’s passion for parkour, and how he wanted to share all of its benefits with his students, creating a parkour club at Coastal Christian High School. The sequence that Levi made will transition nicely into Yuri’s sequence, showing how, no matter what age, parkour has great benefits.

We have come upon a problem this week, however. Like I said last week, we finally got the confirmation from a parkour student saying that we can shadow him and his sons. This is great news! Now the only problem is determining a date. Our rough cut is due a week from today, and even if we get to interview him sometime this week, it will be challenging to edit it all into the rough cut by Monday. But that’s only if he wants to be interviewed this week. It has taken us so long to get the confirmation of his interview, I have my doubts that he will give us a quick time to meet and interview. I guess time will tell, but keep your fingers crossed!

Weekly Update- 03/10

There has been some big news for Greater Heights! We have been trying to get into contact with a father and student of parkour at Port City Gymnastics, to see if we could shadow both him and his son outside of the classroom. With endless calls and voicemails with no response, it did not seem like he was going to respond. Over this past weekend, however, he finally called our producer back! He said he is still excited to be a part of our documentary, so now we just have to schedule a time to film him and his son. This is a great step in the right direction, but I am still nervous about his dependability. Once we have the filming date finalized, I'm sure we will all be at ease.
As for editing, I think we are happy with toying around with how our documentary plays out. At first, we were going to introduce both parkour instructors separately and then move on to different people involved in parkour from there. Instead, we are thinking about showing it topic-to-topic, starting with something like courage, going to respect, etc. I think this will make it easier in the long run, especially with two editors working on Greater Heights. One editor can be working on one specific topic while the other editor works on a different topic, and we can combine all the topics later when we get closer to the rough cut.