Today's the last day of my one-week intensive Editing the Documentary course at MassArt's Summer Film School. It's been a great week, though always a challenge to balance the technical and the theoretical, the different experience levels, and the four different editing platforms students are using!
After several days spent talking about building scenes, working with interviews, and sound design, today we'll get to back up to the big picture and talk about documentary film structure. Hopefully they've read some of the great excerpts I gave them from Robert McKee's Story and Michael Rabinger's Directing the Documentary. I love watching a full feature film and then breaking it down scene by scene, line by line, to see what the narrative skeleton is.
But I'm also looking forward to grabbing a beer with everyone after class ends. One of the great things about the Summer Film School is the people we meet... many of them setting off on first, second, or third careers as documentary filmmakers. Thanks for a meaningful week!