Creating a story for J.D. William’s video

Today I will be editing the J.D. William’s video. I have already shared my filming and editing process on the blog before, but that was more about the technical part. Today I am sharing the creative part: how to create a story?

Pre-production

Before Daniel’s interview, I had a lot of questions in my mind. About his life, his love for whisky and Asian Fusion food. My main question: why a whisky bar with Asian Fusion food in Amsterdam? 

During the filming day we asked all the questions and we filmed all his answers. 

Post-production

Now I am sitting in the editing room (my living room) with all these footage about his youth, work, whisky, food experiences and more. 
What I do first is, match the sound with the video. Then I watch the whole video and cut it up in pieces and meanwhile write a transcript (all the things he have said). So I can easily read back when he said what.

For this video I am trying something new. I am writing interesting parts of the interview on post-its and use those the create the story. Now I can easily shuffle with subjects. 

The structure that I have for the Daniel story is: 
1. Intro: something interesting and funny to catch your attention.
2. Who is this person?
3. A question or problem to solve during the movie
4. Story stuff
5. Answer or problem solved.
6. …?

While I am building the story with pieces of the interview, I might shuffle or change the structure. Because I might find something really fun in the footage what will change the whole structure. Maybe that part will be the main story. I don’t know. 

It’s really fun and challenging though. I have so much story (footage) in my hands and I can decide what things I will share of his story and what not. Of course, I try to make it an interesting story, without giving Daniel a bad image.

This will be a short documentary again, just like Saito’s video. I hope I can finish it in December, but probably not… knowing my laziness. Challenge accepted!