Editing is Writing:
Editing was by far the hardest phase of the project. We had tapes
and tapes full of interviews and B-roll, and a scant amount of footage
containing Mr. Busby himself. We had a hard time deciding where to
begin. With the Creole Gallery interviews, we had a few tapes of truly
good quality video, and many more tapes of stuff that was shaky,
overexposed, had no audio, or suffered from some other technical
issues. 
We began trying with putting together the pieces about Busby but found
it difficult to create a cohesive narrative. Over the last week of the
project, working in teams of two, we edited the film again and again,
trying different combinations of footage and music. Armed with the
working idea that this project was a making-of video, we thought that
our faulty footage could be integrated into an overall narrative about
the obstacles we as a group were able to overcome. A disjointed story
began to emerge, but one that did hang together.
At the beginning of the video, we gathered a series of humorous shots which included video we never imagined would be in the final film. There is the shot of us grappling with the “ethics” of whether to turn over a found newspaper so that the headline would be right side up. Another shot is so overexposed, you can hardly tell what is happening through the bright white light. Our intent was that the poor video would stand in contrast to the the good stuff to demonstrate concretely how much we had learned while making the project. Assembling the footage with a humorous tone helped us to say, “Hey, we’re not pros - don’t focus too much on these technical glitches.” As Dr. Halbritter would say, we were building our ethos as documentarians. When we transition into the good stuff, the interviews we shot in Mr. Busby's Creole Gallery, we hoped the dichotomy would smack the audience over the head with our progress as filmmakers. In the end, we created a six and a half minute piece of video that contained both the worst and best things we'd shot.
Looking back at the film, I know that the video doesn’t stand up on its own as a contained narrative. It hardly tells the audience anything about who Robert Busby was. He was an art gallery owner, an artist, a friend, but the film contains no footage of him talking, nothing about his life story. From our film, you wouldn’t know about his youth growing up in segregated Tennessee, about his alter-ego, Billy, through whom he expressed dark artistic visions, about his deep love for jazz and blues music that lead him to host fantastic concerts and festivals, and so much more (Cosentino, 2007). When we were in the editing room, we just didn’t have the footage we needed to write that story even though we wanted to. What we had was footage of ourselves working together, having fun, and learning about our community and the documentary filmmaking process. But, as good rhetoricians, we thought about our audience: Dr. Halbritter and our classmates. Because of our weekly presentations, we realized they knew as much about Busby as we did, and that they were familiar with our technical glitches and how we overcame them. The pressure was off then to create a cohesive, stand-alone narrative. Instead we tried to briefly highlight some of the issues we explored, about what we had learned about Old Town, Robert Busby, and about the film making process.
We ended up with a six and a half minute piece that moves along at a brisk, almost hyperactive, pace. I think at the time we thought what we lacked in depth could be masked by a blitzkrieg of the information we had. When we presented our film to the class, we were exhausted, but also nervous and excited about how our classmates would react. Would they be disappointed we didn’t deliver on our promise of a twenty-minute documentary? We played the film, and seven minutes later it was over, and our classmates applauded. When we solicited feedback the response was all positive, with the only real critique being a completely valid one: we didn’t paint a complete picture of our documentary subject. But as a group, we knew we had done the best we could with the skills we had, the footage we acquired, and the time we had allotted. And we were proud of what we had achieved, the creation of a something that was more than the sum of its media parts.
To me, that six and a half minute piece seems like it is over in the blink of an eye. Yet that short piece represents hours and hours of labor by six dedicated students. Multimedia writing is interesting like that. Layering media means that much more time and care must be taken in the creation of each layer. That's why when you see a feature film, the credits can stretch on and on. There are so many people involved in a film production, each expertly filling their own specific niche. We did it with six, all of us untrained.
And it is the editing process where all these pieces are brought together from their respective niches, whether it be audio or special effects, layered and arranged with the intent to create a product that is more than the sum of its parts. In our piece, we brought together work about which we were initially frustrated and ashamed, and edited these bits into something that told a story. It was that twist that made us most proud of what we had done. This film taught us not just about the technicalities of film-making, but of the power of documentary to connect us as filmmakers to our surroundings and to communicate that connection to our audience. Through the journey of making this film, we learned that as writers, we were alchemists with the ability to transmogrify even the most humble elements into what we saw as gold.