Monday, August 29, 2016

Group Photography

The final day of the Doc+ Workshop in Taipei began with a screening of "We Come As Friends" (2014) followed by a Q&A with the film editor Cathie Dambel.  In the afternoon, Ms. Dambel gave a master class on film editing, which was followed later in the afternoon by a panel discussion about editing with the three international filmmakers, including Director Feng Yan and myself.



As I did after Director Feng Yan's master class on Friday (STORY), I would like to share a few lessons that master editor Ms. Dambel shared during the panel:
  • There will be conflicts.
  • The editor must always accompany the director.
  • Each player on the film team has a role to play and does not cross-over.
  • A director should spend 50% of the time selecting the team.
  • If the edit is 6 weeks, I like to work 3 weeks, then 2 weeks, then 1 week on the edit, with breaks in between.
  • When the character is speaking, we must sense what is being said as well as what is not being said.
  • The aim of editing is how to represent what you felt.
  • Sometimes in our own films we must take a risk, we need to take this risk to express ourselves.
Following the editing panel discussion, the members of the 8 groups of filmmakers who had applied to attend the workshop with their film projects, gathered together for a de-briefing during which the young filmmakers shared their observations and some of that they had learned.  I was deeply honoured to hear that although some of them had not fully comprehended our feedback during the initial one to one sessions, after taking part in our master classes they had more fully understood what we had shared with them.



The event ended with a group photo:


This morning I was interviewed by Shr-tzung and Fan Wu from the Taiwan International Documentary Festival for the Taiwan Documentary E-Paper and their readership of Taiwanese documentary filmmakers and industry professionals. 

It was so interesting to be interviewed about my film career so soon after the workshop ended; my mind was still swimming after having shown some of my early work and that had inspired me to start tracing back the path that has brought me to where I am today...



I am now at the airport on the way home to Japan, sad to leave Taiwan, a country I love so much, but also happy to get back to work on my new films re-inspired and re-invigorated.

********* UPDATED October 2, 2016 **********

Shr-tzung has just e-mailed me the links to the published article, so to all of my Chinese-speaking friends, please take a look!  And for the rest of you, there are lots of pictures!  ;)

【紀錄・人物】「最親密的他者」——專訪紀錄片導演伊恩.湯瑪斯.艾許 LINK

And the transcript of the master class I gave has also been published in two parts:

【DOC+紀錄片工作坊】以紀錄片之名 ─ 伊恩.湯瑪斯.艾許大師講堂記錄(上)LINK
【DOC+紀錄片工作坊】以紀錄片之名 ─ 伊恩.湯瑪斯.艾許大師講堂記錄(下)LINK

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