We’ve finally come to the editing process of Into The Pit. After all the interviews and research, we have just under 2 hours worth of audio to condense into a 15 minute piece. To do this, we had to decide what was the most important content to include and what we should leave for if there is room. Fortunately, Elliot has an idea of the parts he thinks are the most essential so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

One difficulty we ran into is that Elliot’s audio was very varied in levels and had a light bit of crackle in places. Although we are not 100% sure as to why the equipment was making this noise in recording, Will was able to reduce this using noise reduction tools so the material could be used. Without this, we could have lost a lot of good content.

Another problem we encountered was when we were transferring the edit over different computers. As the edited files were only saved on the computer it was edited on, some files could not be found as the new computer didn’t have these edits. This led to parts of the factual being either missing or replaced by other audio. When we loaded the files on the original computer, the files were still lost so had to be re edited. Although this could be amended, it was still very time consuming.  The lesson we could take from this is reduce the number of file transfers across computers as much as possible.

To reduce the length of the piece, certain parts of the documentary had to be dropped. The lamp interview went into a lot more detail and explored how the lamp functioned. As interesting as this was, we felt that it wasn’t essential and that the initial point had been made. We also had a part about a lump of coal which Elliot’s Grandmother had kept in a box in her loft. Again, we felt that we had already established that Elliot’s grandparents had a lot of mining memorabilia.

In terms of added sound, Elliot wanted to reduce the amount of added sound as much as possible to not draw attention away from the dialogue. If we perhaps had almost a day in the life of a miner, we might have been able to create almost a soundscape to play alongside. Had we come up with this idea earlier on, we would have liked to create this. The added sound we did include was a brass band piece at the start and end. We did debate whether this was the best decision but, based on the topic, we felt this was the best choice. We were careful not to overuse this music as too much would possibly become quite aggravating.

Overall as producer I am very happy about the final product, I feel that the documentary follows what we set out to do in the initial proposal/ treatment, however if we was to do it again I would consider sourcing more additional sounds to have in the editing process.