8 Whole Minutes!!!!!

Oh my gosh!!!!! I can't believe it! I cannot believe that after editing our First Quarter Project together, it came out to be 8 minutes!! Aaahhhh! I know that my scripts always tend to be to long, but I never would have thought that my First Quarter Project would be EIGHT whole minutes! It's going to be a real big challenge to shorten my project down at least 5 minutes! However, that's just something I'm gonna have to do. There's absolutely no way to get around that. The hard thing is that I feel that every sound byte that we have in the script is kind of important to the story. I like the way it's written now. So I think that cutting out unnecessary sound bytes is going to be the toughest part of shortening the script for me. But, I'm so grateful that I have a partner who's a really fast learner and who gives great advice. Last class she went through the script and showed me all the places where she thought we could take out some sound bytes. So hopefully that will take out a few minutes. Another tip I'm trying to use to make our project shorter is to speed up the people's talking. Sounds a little weird, right? At least I thought it was. But, what can I say? Final Cut Pro is amazing! By pressing the "command" key and then the "J" key, you get to a setting where you can speed up the clip from 100% to whatever percent you want! But, if you decide to ever use this, just make sure you don't speed the clip up to fast, because the higher percent you go, the squeakier the audio gets! For example, when I booted the clip up to 125%, our interviewee's voice sounded, well... like a chipmunk! It was funny, but definitely not suitable for our finished project! In conclusion, hopefully by doing whatever we can to shorten our project, it will turn out to be three minutes long, yet still be a great, sensible news story!