China Stories

We are family.

16th June 2008, Flora

NEW! Del and I have put the production team's family tree up on the website today! Go have a wee look here.

We thought it would be a good idea to show you all the people who are working on the whole project, and we came up with a way to display the information, so you can look at the different parts of the team - like the crew who were working in China, and the team who are producing the radio programmes.

NEW! We've also been putting up some new video diary entries - you can find the first ones here.

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It's been a while.

16th June 2008, Gerald

Thought I'd better check in as it's been a while (well, a week).

We are now back and preparing for the edit. That means that people here have been ingesting our rushes into the BBC system. Basically sucking the tapes into a big computer hard drive which then allows us to view everything we shot without bothering the tapes that all the stuff was shot on. Tapes aren't always that hardy and so it is good to only use them when you absolutely have to and having them in this digital forms means that everything works an awful lot quicker.

So now we are spending our days looking at everything we shot and picking out the bits we want to use, going through our scripts to see what works and what doesn't and re- jigging where necessary and looking at the full translations to see what people actually said during our interviews. At the time of interviewing George acted as a translator but we needed something that would give us a full translation of what people said with time code on it (some numbers that tell us what happens when on the tape) so that we can work out which bits to chop in and out of during the edit (we don't want to cut anyone off shor... see what I did there?).

We also have to speak to the people who are creating our graphics to get them started on making cool title sequences and subtitles for us. Another job is to pick out all the music that we want to use in the programmes and to think about who we might get to do the voice overs.

We may not be in busy Beijing anymore but things are still pretty full on as we begin editing in just over a week.

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