I’m sat here in ‘The Shed’ at Radio 1 editing the final part of Shoot The Summer arguing with Pete Roach about which bits to leave in. I want to leave the mistakes in, he’s rather they were taken out. As the editor Pete has had the daunting task of gluing all the clips together in a way that tells some kind of meaningful story. Poor Pete.
Fortunately for him I made a massive editorial decision the day I came up with the idea for a full-length user generated movie. Rather than asking the audience to send in their clips all summer whilst I was tanning myself in Ibiza I wanted to get out there and meet the people first, get to know them a little, then give them a phone to capture their festival experience. I had to be confident that they could film something of value before I’d part with the phone. It’s not easy making that judgment having known someone for such a short time but it seemed to make a lot more sense than wading through thousands of random clips, emailed anonymously by people I’d never met.
We are so used to thinking of UGC as ‘cats on skateboards’ that we often can’t see beyond the youtube experience. I’m pretty happy with the results and my method seems to have produced some nicely shot well thought out pieces from both the audience and the bands. I’ll be honest, part of me really did think I was gonna go through summer trying to make sense of bands board on tour buses and kids off their faces in tents but that certainly isn’t the case.
As I said earlier I’m still editing so I’ve still not watched the film in full. If you were to force me for an early assessment of it I'd say its it pretty bloody good... But I would wouldn't. I’ll know if this whole project has worked in the next few days as it’s being screened on Wednesday at the Electric Proms. I’ll blog again next week and chat more about my learning’s and the people I met over the summer.
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