The Wrestling For Jesus narrative - seems so simple. If only it was so.

There is an adage in documentary filmmaking that the film is created in the editing suite.  Of course what you shoot does matter but during production you try to cover a variety of potential story lines and in post you figure out if those story lines actually can be massaged into something that people will want to watch.

That’s what we are doing right now with Wrestling For Jesus.  We’re working our way through about 50 hours of footage (not an awful lot for a documentary) to unearth the story that I hope is waiting to be discovered.  This process began with two steps – transcribing the interviews and logging and capturing the footage.  Because I like options, we captured all the footage and logged it by event.  Next I sat down and watched everything, taking careful notes based on clip names.  This process helped me decide where scene breaks might happen.

After all the footage was watched and all my notes were printed, I used CeltX (free production software) to write out all the potential scenes that I thought the footage could handle.  I recorded three things for each scene – the name, a description, and a reason why this scene was important.  You can’t construct a narrative out of a series of scenes that are just “interesting.”  Each scene has to accomplish something narratively.  Some scenes were about foreshadowing conflict, some scenes reveal insecurity, and some other scenes reveal inner character.  But each scene should start at one place and end at another – or that is the hope.

A Wrestling For Jesus Scene Card - "salture" should read "salute"

Once I had all my scenes on nice little cards, I printed those out and began to arrange a narrative flow.  My editing assistant then took that narrative flow along with my copious notes and in Final Cut Pro, she began editing each scene into a sequence.  We are now in a groove where each day she spends about 6 hours roughing out scenes and then I spend 2 hours polishing them into the overall narrative.  It’s been a good workflow that has led to some serious momentum in getting a rough draft finished.