During my sophomore year of college, I took a documentary film class that ended with an extremely disappointing project.

We had a good subject matter, and put a lot of work into the film, but the end result was not good at all. Two years later I had some time in my fall schedule, and took on an independent study project to give the documentary genre another shot. The focus of the project was The Crusader, the student newspaper at Susquehanna University.

I wanted to explore a few things that as a former editor I knew we had sometimes talked about in small groups, but had never discussed as an organization. There were issues like whether staff members should be paid, if the one practicum credit was worth all the effort, what it was like to put in all the work only to see people throw away the paper without reading it and what it was like to go through all of that together.

One side perk was that the communications department had some extra money to spend during the summer, so I arrived back at campus to find a brand new, top of the line Mac G5 editing system. It was one of those pieces of technology that is so beautiful you don’t even want to touch it. Not only was it a big step up from our Windows-based Adobe Premiere system, but nobody really knew how to use the FinalCut editing software. So as part of my independent study, I basically had the machine all to myself for the semester with the understanding that I would later teach people how to use it.

It was a pretty sweet deal.

I interviewed most of the editorial board within a week span about midway through the semester. The only major editor not featured is the sports editor Sarah, who not only had time constraints from playing volleyball but also was not a fan of talking to me with a camera in my hand.

The process for producing one issue of the weekly newspaper encompasses about a week and a half. All of the non-interview footage follows one specific issue — including the initial editorial board meeting, staff meeting, budget meeting and two nights of actually laying out the paper.

Here is the film in two parts, with additional discussion about the process below (after hitting play, change the 360p in the bottom right corner to 480p for optimal viewing):

After showing the film to everyone when it was done, I sent all of the editors a questionnaire to see what they thought. I asked for their overall impression, what insights they may have gained, whether they thought the subject was treated fairly and how they thought my relationship with the newspaper affected the film I was able to make.

The last question was really the most interesting to me. I started as a staff writer for the paper during my sophomore year, and the following year served as the sports editor. Senior year I dropped back to just being a writer, covering a few sports teams and writing the weekly sports column. For the edition seen in the film, I only wrote the sports column.

The editors said that because I had been in their position, they felt they were much more comfortable in opening up to me. They said they would have been much more wary about letting a total outsider into their office, and would have acted differently.

What none of us really expected was the wide range of opinions that came out during the interviews. The pay issue was particularly interesting with who wanted to pay whom, and why.

I also didn’t expect it to be as funny as it was (at least to me). The editors usually work very late nights on Wednesday and Thursdays, and there’s a certain amount of silliness that comes out of the process. I always chalked that up to people getting a little punchy without sleep, but the daytime interviews certainly brought out some sneaky funny people.

In total, I think I shot about 16 hours of footage using two different cameras (Sony PD170 and Panasonic PV-DV851). One of the biggest challenges was taking that monster stack of video and getting it in a somewhat organized state. That began with giving each tape a number (label your tapes!):

I then captured each tape into the computer, jotting down notes about specific shots I might want to use as the tape was playing. By the end of the project, I had kind of a mad scientist thing going on with my stack of notes. I’ll close with a few scanned sheets, with some attempted explanations as to what is going on with each one (links will open in new window):

Interview Questions
I started out with a standard list of questions to ask each editor, and added a few more that were targeted to each one. As you can see, there are some issues that didn’t make it into the film. I had some additional directions I wanted to go, but at some point you just have to stop.

Video Bins
This was probably the most important piece of paper to me for that entire semester. In FinalCut, you can create these virtual bins to organize sets of clips. What you see here are four sections (one for each portion of the paper), with a number and letter for each clip. I have two double-sided pages like this, and as crazy as it may look, it all made perfect sense to me at the time.

Film Outline
Besides keeping all of the footage straight, developing the story of the film was the most difficult part. I spent a number of days hopelessly looking through the video trying to come up with a logical structure. You can see here the basic outline at the top and a more developed list below that with timecodes for where each section ends. Off to the right, there’s a pair of drawings with the words “narrative arc.” I think that came from trying to explain to my professor how each portion told its own story, and that those added up to a total arc that took us from one place to another.

Narration Script
With an outline in place, the real anchor for moving the story along was the narration. I tried to say as little as possible, instead letting the editors tell their story. But there were a few parts that just needed a sentence or two of explanation to orient things. Probably the biggest thing I have wanted to redo is the voice track. At the time I recorded it, it was “good enough” to get the editing process rolling and I never went back to do a better version. Oh well.

I also can’t explain why I didn’t hide the mic cords during the interviews, which is definitely distracting. Finally, I wish I had taken the time to make a blooper reel. Sarah wouldn’t sit down for an interview, but I have a tape with an amazingly entertaining segment of her eating a piece of chocolate. The audio from some of the office interactions you saw but didn’t hear would have also been worth the effort.

Good times.