Okay, I know I’m going off the deep end with this one, but I have another idea for a utility that would make outlining documentary footage a whole lot easier.
So, you shot your documentary. You’ve got your insanely large quantity of footage. The focus has changed a little from when you started the project, but you’re not quite sure how to organize the additional themes that have started to emerge from the footage.Organizing the clips into topics is the first step. Some clips have multiple themes, where the speaker says something relevant to multiple topics of your documentary. Some of their utterances are a good transition from one into the other.
Right now I have a nice giant spreadsheet with every clip on it, sortable by themes. But keeping track of these potential transitions between topics is tricky. It requires another chart… and I get to look at two charts at the same time. Not so good.
Quick background: in computer program algorithm studies, there is a model called a “graph.” A graph in this context is a collection of points called “nodes” and lines connecting them called “edges.” Any picture you’ve ever drawn which was a bunch of circles connected to each other by lines is potentially a graph. Edges only connect nodes, they never intersect other edges.
A lot of algorithms focus on travel between nodes, along those edges. So a “Directed graph” is a graph where the edges can only be traversed in one direction. Like a bunch of circles, with a bunch of arrows each starting at a circle and ending at another circle.
How does this help us? Those circles are our documentary topics. And the arrows are the transitions. If someone talks about our film topic of “dogs,” the clip belongs to the “dogs” node. If someone talks about our film topic of “cats,” the clip belongs to the “cats” node.
If they say something like “they were fighting like cats and dogs!” that is a transition! The clip can be used at the end of the “dogs” segment to introduce the “cats” segment, or vice versa. It can be marked on the graph as an arrow between the “cats” node and the “dogs” node. For that matter, it could go either way, so it should be a double-headed arrow.
If we graphed the entire topic list like this, we could find an outline to the movie by following a path along the topic nodes and remembering which transitions represent which edges between the nodes.
So, I’m looking for an easy dynamic graphing applet which supports directed graphs. Either that or I”m going to have to draw a 40+ node graph and redraw it over and over until it looks legible… gah.
But wouldn’t that be a great add-on to my dream documentary outline software?