We’ve learned to leave a day for file management. As you know from previous blogs, we seem to love this topic. What does a final day involve:
- Steve works out all accounts
- Andy works out all audio, including the Ketebul recordings
- Pato works through all video
- Jimmy works through all field reports and works with Nick on final spelling
- Tabu has final interviews with musicians
- We all agree next steps in terms of updating all our trip reports
- We have a final session on our learnings, positive and negative.
On the last topic, here are our reflections on our management of things (elsewhere we will talk about the music, as we did with Tabu yesterday), where we drew 5 main lessons on this trip:
- Agree the ‘must do’ instruments/song styles at the beginning of trip planning and then make sure we have a group (and a back up group for each). On this trip we came close to missing a couple styles.
- We work ourselves too hard in the field and don’t leave enough time for file management. So, we have established two new ‘non-negotiables’: a) no driving at night, and b) all travel plans must assume an average speed of 50 kph. It is simply impossible for two vans and 10 people to travel faster.
- Keep a running table of groups, songs and audio takes and camera times. This worked very well this trip and by circulating the table to everyone we could keep making corrections to everything as we went. The person who drives the clapper board should control the ‘final spelling’ of all and then work with Camera 2 to keep a log of all songs/takes and times. This also requires us to keep all watches and computers/cameras on same time.
- Agree to do an audio mix in the field and bounce immediately for videos. The ‘field’ audio becomes the input recording for videos (they need to be topped and tailed but no other editing) – we then will go back and do more detailed mixes on audio that we want to include in DVD’s and CD’s. This allows for much faster uploading of videos.
That’s it. Onward and upward…. reflections to follow. And thanks as always to Priscah for making Ketebul Studios such a wonderful home for Singing Wells…
Jimmy
(Ketebul Studios)