Earlier this month I took my camera gear down to the offices of The Original Supper Box Co. in Warnham, to spend a couple of afternoons with Graeme and Jody who recently formed the business.
This was an opportunity to test out all of the gear and practice my skills ahead of starting work on my feature-length movie, Boom!, which will be released in November.
It also gave me the chance to use the Final Cut Pro X editing software for the first time.
I started by interviewing both brothers, for around 20 minutes each, asking them a series of open questions about what motivated them to start the business.
We were working to a brief for the Sundance London Short Film Competition, which was looking for short film submissions inspired by the theme “Making a go of it”.
A day later I returned to film another hour of footage, this time in the kitchen with Jody packing boxes to send to customers and then experimenting by cooking a future dish.
Back at the office, I had 40 minutes of interview footage and an hour of ‘b-roll’ footage to condense down to 5 minutes. This is where the really hard work begins!
Using Final Cut Pro, I selected my favourite clips from the interviews and added them to the storyline. 40 minutes quickly became 12 minutes and then further editing took it down to under 5.
You have to be really brutal during this editing process, leaving out some really good content to focus solely on the really excellent content!
Once I was happy with the 5 minutes worth of interviews, I worked on the sequence in which they appeared so they would tell a story and progress neatly through the film.
The next task was to select footage from the kitchen to lay over the top of the interviews, so viewers would be listening to Graeme and Jody talking but watching the action taking place in the kitchen.
Finally, I had to make some fine adjustments to the cuts, add some space between a few of the interview clips, grade all of the colour (a bit like editing photographs), balance the sound, add a soundtrack and titles.
This whole editing process took nearly five hours, despite the speed of the iMac we are using and the ease of use of the editing software.
Here is the end result, my five minute short film called “The Entrepreneurs”:
The Entrepreneurs from Martin Bamford on Vimeo.
I hope you like it and welcome any feedback.
Work has already started on Boom!, with the first expert interview filmed last week.
Completing the documentary will involve a further 14 expert interviews, several events (including our filmed Death Cafe next month) and a client case study.
Once the filming is finished in the summer, we estimate the initial editing process will take 80-100 hours. We will then hand the movie over to professional editors to create a broadcast ready movie, ready for screenings and public release in November.
