Friday June 26th

Fridays are always pretty interesting in Complexo do Mare. We came in a little bit late, but luckily the children have a lot of things to play with at Luta Pela Paz. We found them all in the gym and they were ready for a new class. This was our schedule for Friday.

Icebreaker 2:00-2:15 – Telephone game/Micheal Jackson

Editing 2:15 – 2:30
• What are the basics of editing?
• What’s the purpose of editing?
• Why do you have to edit?
• We edit because for the amount of footage we get, we can’t watch all of it.
o To get a narrative line.
o For the viewers to understand what we are trying to portray.

Break 5-10 (?)

Footage from last week. 2:40 – 3:10
• The last 10 minutes: watch 5 min. from the Amazons and talk about it 5 minutes.
• Video clips from last class
• What worked and what didn’t work?

Talk about what we’re filming today. 3:10 – 3:25
• Going to locations with Bira
• Graffiti (?)
• Visiting the homes of the students (?)
• Animals in the neighborhood
• Restaurants in the neighborhood
• David’s bike

The first theoretical parts went well. We had a great editing workshop and we discussed editing while watching parts of the video letter from the Amazon again. After the class we were supposed to have a brief talk with Bira, who is our security guy in the favela, about different possible locations for shooting outdoor scenes. We never got so far because of pretty heavy machine gun funk from outside the organization. There was a slight panic spreading through us, the professors, whereas the children did not seem to pay any attention to it at all. The children are used to the rapid and loud clacking sounds from AK-47's, maybe we will get used to it too after a few more weeks. Today was the second Friday in a row where we have had to "hide" for about half an hour because of shootings outside. However, we changed our schedule and started doing presentations of the administration and the various professors instead. This went very well, and it was great seeing the kids filming themselves, checking sound and white balance (without really adjusting the white balance, we reckoned the kids just thought it was a cool thing to stand in front of the camera pretending to do some serious video production stuff, holding up a white sheet of paper..) and moving around presenting their professors totally on their own,. This is exactly what we have been working towards, having the children film and present their surroundings on their own, establishing a natural component to the video letter.

We also sorted out where we can edit the film and what software to use. We were lucky to be able to use the computers at Observatorio das Favelas, another NGO in Mare not far from Luta Pela Paz. We will start rendering what we have of footage Wednesday and start editing on Friday with the children.

Christoffer Næss
New School University, New York