Logging Footage: The Most Tedious Job Ever

Many of you might think creating a documentary film is a glamorous gig. You might think my days are composed of meetings with big studio executives, spirited phone calls, and artistic swaths of wild creativity.

Well you’d be wrong…at least for the moment. Right now I’m in the preliminary stages of the process, what the professionals call “logging tapes.”

Basically, it works like this:

I sit at my desk. I load an imported DV tape on my laptop. I watch the footage. Every few seconds I stop the tape, flip over to my spreadsheet and type out a truckload of notes: the timecodes of every cut, what the scene is about, who is featured, quality of the audio, and of course, every spoken word of dialogue.

All of it must be cataloged and organized before I flip back to the tape, watch a few more seconds, stop, then do it again.

By my estimate, an hour’s worth of footage takes about 4 hours to log. When you consider I have over 80 hours of footage spread over as many tapes, I figure it will take me two months before I finish logging them all.

Now don’t get me wrong. Logging tapes is crucial to every documentary film. It let’s you know exactly the raw material you have to construct your story. Already, as I view all the scenes I forgot, the creative juices and ideas are churning in my head. I can feel the structure of the film take shape.

Ideally, I would have actually logged the tapes at the end of every day on the road. But unfortunately, that wasn’t possible with other projects to complete, plus the fact that I produced over 16 weekly episodes of the journey, while simultaneously filming the next week.

So here I sit, diligently working away. Trying to keep my mind on the task at hand (curse you Facebook!)

I know the day will come when I can start on the juicy stuff - actually editing the film into its first tentative frames of existence. And when that day comes, I’ll enjoy spirited phone calls and wild swaths of creativity.

But until then… I log.