One of the first opportunities presented to me as a young editor starting out were as part of the ID Films scheme run by the Galway Film Centre. Under this Scheme, they have been working with community groups to make films about a groups sense of its own identity. This is done by giving participants basic foundation training and hands-on experience in the areas of writing, directing, camera, sound and editing. The groups then tell their own stories based on the common theme of identity.
You can visit the Galway film centre site here and you can watch all of the films made under the scheme
In all I did three of them which are all presented below, they are of varying quality. A lot depended on the group telling their story, some where better then other in terms of what story they had to tell and also the level of involvement they were prepared to put in. The scheme has been going for ten years which means somewhere in the region of 40 films have been made, most have been of a high standard, some have been awful and occassionally some have touched on true magic. If I had to pick out three from the entire canon, I’d go for Paddy O’Connor’s fantastic St.Grellan’s which was eventually turned into a 25min documentary for RTE and Keith Walsh’s slice of life from the Fairgreen about the homeless community in Galway City and of course Dusty Banjoes by my brother the one and only Paul Murphy
I didn’t work on any of those which is perhaps why they are so good!
2001 – Caught Offside
This was the first thing I edited through to completion. I watched it again when it was uploaded by the GFC to Youtube and was kind of surprised by it. Technically it is awful, the camerawork and especially the sound leave a lot to be desired. My editing is naive at best and there are several schoolboy errors but in terms of the story structure its about right and the film is easy to follow even if the technical deficinies make it hard to watch.
2002- Send in the Butterflies
This film which was about the Galway Centre for Independent Living was much superior in terms of how it was shot then the previous ID Film I had done. It certainly has its moments and I remember being chuffed that I was editing something with Aidan Quinn in it. I look at this and I can see that I’m getting confidence as an editor but a lot of what I was trying out doesn’t really work. It’s too long and turns into something close to a polemic at one point but when its about the people as opposed to the issue its actually very good. The music in it is a reflection of what I was listening to at the time as opposed to what worked for the piece, a typical mistake of an editor just getting his feet.
2004 – The Potters
I did this one with Paddy O’Connor about a pottery factory in Shannon. In terms of how its edited and its overall production value this is by far the best of the ID Films I did. Its just a shame that there is not much story to tell here, but its not overlong, its very well shot and its stiched together nicely. It’s just not that interesting…
John Murphy 