{"id":138,"date":"2010-06-15T09:15:45","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T09:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/productionbase.wordpress.com\/?p=138"},"modified":"2015-08-14T16:20:52","modified_gmt":"2015-08-14T15:20:52","slug":"editing-inside-hezbollah-a-documentary-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.productionbase.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/06\/15\/editing-inside-hezbollah-a-documentary-film\/","title":{"rendered":"Editing ‘Inside Hezbollah’, A Documentary Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

Freelancer Anthea Harvey, is and experienced Film Editor who recently finished the documentary film Inside Hezbolla,<\/em> an MI2 Production. Anthea shares her work experience while editing in Tunisia.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Inside<\/p>\n

Inside Hezbollah<\/strong> is an observational documentary looking at the popular support for Hezbollah in South Lebanon and following the build up to the 2009 elections. The Director was looking for a British editor to collaborate on the film in order to add the Western perspective to his own experience, and to add UK television high production values and documentary style to the film. The film was to be privately funded and sold to worldwide distributors\/broadcasters on completion.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The edit was initially supposed to be in Beirut, with the opportunity that gave for shooting pick-ups, but the security situation after the elections meant that working on a film about Hezbollah (seen as a terrorist organisation by many) might have been dangerous.<\/p>\n

As the Director is Tunisian we relocated and for the first two weeks of the edit I was put up in a resort hotel on the Tunisian coast \u2013 the edit suite was in my sitting room and I could swim in the pools or the sea when I took a break from the edit!<\/p>\n

For the remaining 6 weeks I commuted between my budget hotel in Tunis to the Director\u2019s post-production suite, housed in a converted garage next to his home. This involved directing Arabic speaking taxi drivers, in French, across the city to the suburbs. A daily linguistic adventure!<\/p>\n

The edit suite was fully equipped, but still under construction, with a dubbing studio being built into the same space while I was cutting. With temperatures outside hitting 38-40\u00ba the air conditioning was always on \u2013 but unfortunately that kept overloading the LX supply so power cuts were frequent\u2026 [cmd S, cmd S, cmd S]<\/p>\n

Working hours were much shorter than in the UK, with a 9-4 day being quite normal, and breaks for long chats and the occasional swim being almost insisted on.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was another editor working alongside me from time to time, who was cutting teasers and extracts from the same doc material, but targeted to the Arabic market. It was fascinating to see how different the editing style was. Sequences were cut like Hollywood film trailers, and music was big, loud and dramatic. The commentary style was equally dramatic, and was intended to lead the viewer rather than appear impartial. It was useful to\u00a0 see the Arabic TV style when it came to working on the voiceover script with the director, as I could see where he was coming from and show how it differed from the British doc style he wanted me to lend to the film.<\/p>\n