Impulse

I made some good progress this week on my Race Across America doc­u­men­tary.  It’s really com­ing together, and know what?  It’s not half bad! 

My break­through this week was real­iz­ing that I don’t have to stick to the chronol­ogy so dog­mat­i­cally.  Near the end of the race, for exam­ple, there were a cou­ple of days near dur­ing which the team was obsessed by the Brazilian team.  In the mid­dle of this com­pet­i­tive push, the our crew chief had to leave the race because he couldn’t get the time off for the full race from his boss.  I strug­gled with this in pre­vi­ous drafts — do I inter­rupt the whole Brazilian thing with Paul’s exit, or do I pull that out, break­ing the chronol­ogy but telling the story bet­ter?  Seems like an easy choice when I put it that way, but it took me a lit­tle while to real­ize the obvious. 

All of this is allow­ing me to keep the movie inter­est­ing while stick­ing to my The War Room inspired verite style I chose when I started this whole thing.  There’s not a sin­gle inter­view or talk­ing head in the War Room.  Being a doc­u­men­tary still pho­tog­ra­pher, I thought this would be a nat­ural style for me to slide into.  Having done it, I’ve got to say, “Damn, it’s hard!”  Watching War Room again, I see the sub­tlety of their work — it feels like you’re a fly on the wall, watch­ing events tran­spire in real time as Bill Clinton ran for office, but the film­mak­ers care­fully rearranged events slightly.  Events are grouped to fol­low sto­ry­lines, so that those sto­ries play out with­out much distraction. 

So while I’m rear­rang­ing things, here’s a lit­tle some­thing to keep you busy.  It’s the first 15 min­utes of the movie — pretty much every­thing lead­ing up to the start of the race.  I haven’t shown this sec­tion in its entirety to any­one yet, so I’d love any feed­back you have.  

First off, is it inter­est­ing?  If not, where do you tune out?

Second, is any­thing con­fus­ing or dis­ori­ent­ing?  Do you feel you know what’s going on in this and what this movie is about? 

Anything else stand out in your mind?  (good or bad)

Don’t worry about the sound edit­ing or color bal­ance & such.  I’ll do that once I’ve got the slic­ing & dic­ing done.

And for those, just join­ing us, here’s the whole saga of me mak­ing this movie.

Related posts:

1. RAAM: a lit­tle dis­tance is good
2. RAAM: edit­ing the hard­est race in the world
3. Camerawork and edit­ing RAAM
4. RAAM movie: the final sprint
5. RAAM: still cranking