Editing 30 hours of footage down to 45 minutes is a monumental task that Kyle Hufford’s (FiveCore Gen. Manager) Advanced Editing class tackled during the fall semester. Kyle traveled to Greece and Italy this past May with a Goshen College Communication class documenting the journey of the Apostle Paul (check out Kate Yoder’s blog about her experience with the class). Kyle’s class spent the first part of the semester learning different editing techniques including composition, motion graphics, and sound editing. The second half was then dedicated to applying those techniques and editing footage from the Greece/Rome trip into a 45 minute educational video titled “Breaking Down Barriers: the Journey of the Apostle Paul.”

The class was divided into three groups (motion graphics, video editing, and sound editing) based on their strengths and interests. Kyle’s is the first class dedicated specifically to teaching post-production techniques so it was a very intense learning curve for students. They not only had to learn these skills in half a semester, but then immediately apply them to a project to be screened publicly. I was fortunate enough to audit the class and act as a supervisor to students throughout the process.

In a typical post-production workflow the editors will finish the video and hand it over to sound who will then finish and hand it over to the animation team. For this documentary, the groups were all working at the same time. Restricted by the academic timeline, the groups couldn’t afford to wait until the other group was finished so constant communication was essential. The importance of not just communicating between groups, but within groups as well, is a valuable lesson that students learned.

The project came with many challenges and frustrations but the students and I learned a lot from the experience. The class was unique in that it provided students with a very “real-life” working situation, complete with deadlines that absolutely could not be pushed back. The students’ deadline was the premiere held in place of a final exam at the end of the semester. We invited the entire Communication department along with other Goshen College faculty and staff to view the documentary and to give constructive feedback. The students got to feel a different sort of pressure that comes when you know that your semester’s work will be viewed and critiqued by professionals other than your teacher, again a great insight to the professional world.

Now that the class completed a first draft it is up to Seth Conley, Kyle and I to continue “sweetening” the documentary in preparation for public premiere in late Spring.