For my senior project, I was the director for a documentary exploring Rexburg’s local music scene. The documentary is called The Scene, and we’re creating it to highlight the musicians, organizers, and community members who helped create a thriving local music scene.
This Project also serves as my capstone film, so as of (07/10/26), it is still in post-production and is on track to be completed later this month, on July 21st. While I am still in the process of editing my documentary, I want to share what goes into shaping the story.
Project Overview
Our goal with this factual documentary is to tell the story of the people who make the Rexburg music scene the scene that it is. We interviewed musicians and community members to understand how the music scene has grown and how it unites people.
As the editor, my responsibility has been transforming hours of interviews and live performance footage into one 8-minute cohesive narrative.
My Role
Throughout post-production, I have been responsible for:
- Organizing footage into project bins for efficient editing
- Reviewing both b-roll and interview footage
- Familiarizing myself with hours’ worth of interview transcripts to build the story
- Selecting the strongest sound bites to support the narrative
- Building the documentary structure and pacing
- Developing color grading node trees
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges was waiting to get all of the footage from interviews and shows. Another challenge is crafting a clear story with such a large amount of footage. Each interview has meaningful moments, so picking the best quotes has taken careful revisions and feedback from the client (teacher) and director. Another challenge has been finding natural transitions between different interviews so that different voices can come together to tell one cohesive story. It is also a challenge to be proportionately representative among all of the interviews
What I’ve learned
This project has strengthened my documentary editing skills. This is the largest and hardest project I have ever worked on, by far. Editing isn’t just assembling clips, but it’s about crafting a story. The editor is directing the attention of the audience.
Interviewees:
Interview transcripts ( 2 of 9)