50 10 Words Every Doc Filmmaker Should Know

• 01 Ambient Sound: background sound to add atmosphere to the sound track (also known as "atmos" and "wildtrack. Eki is a musician and is great at enhancing the audio.
•  02 Animation: one of the things I love in the edit is when Eki animates something. He´ll add a person or object. Or show how a building changes. It might take two hours of work and be on-screen for a few seconds so he rations me.
• 03 Boom:  the pole that holds the microphone out of the shot but near enough so that it picks up the audio.
• 04  Color Correction: after the edit Eki goes through and balances all the colors so they are the same tone throughout. We choose what  color direction we want: bright, shady, blueish, etc.
• 05 Copyright: the artist´s legal right to the use of his/her work. Copyrights can be a minefield. Any doc filmmaker, however small, should be au courant when using someone´s music, art, books, etc.
• 06 NLE (non-linear editing): allows you to insert footage anywhere in the edit without having to remove what was there before.
• 07  Rough cut:  first edit of the un-finished film. You might have one, two or more rough cuts.
• 08 Steadicam: a stabilizing device attached to the camera and worn by the photographer. It allows him to walk through the scene and creates a long fluid shot. Very effective. Our steadicam man is Antti Hacklin.
• 09  Time Code: the seconds, minutes, hours on the top of the film that lets you synchronize the audio and the video. Also a big help in the pre-edit when you want to pick out the best shots.  
• 10  Zebra Striping: lines seen through the camera´s viewfinder that tells you when a shot is over-exposed. 

Edit by Eki: I'd probably define NLE:s by it's difference to old school tape to tape editing. In the stone age (when i used to ski to old school both winter AND summer), the program was cut together in a linear fashion by copying one shot at a time from the source tapes to a master tape, starting from the first opening shot and ending to the last bit of credits. If you then needed to change something in the middle... you were screwed, as the timing of the shots was fixed - the tape doesn't magically stretch or compress to fit the new material you want to put in the middle. With a NLE, making such a changes is trivial, one can easily shuffle shots around in any order. In practice, all current computer based editing systems are NLE:s, so the "NL" part of the abbreviation is unnecessary baggage really.

Other than that, you mostly got it close enough  ;-)


Lesson 50:  Learn the lingo

Next week: 51 A Tiny Ton of Troubl