A Day in the Life of a Story Associate Producer at Pilgrim Media Group

Specifically in post-production, it's different from being in the field. Right now, in post, I clock in. You could say it's more of a typical nine-to-five job. I work from home, usually from 9:30 AM to 6:00 PM.

I remotely access my workstation. We used to be in the office, but now I access my workstation from home and start watching footage. Let's say I have a new day of fresh footage. I open that file, and it could contain six different groups of footage from that day. Each group is about three hours long, so that's 18 hours of footage for just one day.

The fishermen often leave at one or two in the morning and fish all day. We keep our cameras running continuously from when they leave until they return. So, if they leave at 2:00 AM and come back at 10:00 PM, I'm watching all of that.

As I start watching this footage, I'm really looking for the audio waveforms. I'll turn on the waveforms to see when they're talking. These are fishermen, and fishing involves a lot of sitting around and waiting. I look for when they're talking because that's usually where the good stuff is. At least, that's where I start.

I'll begin listening and jumping around their audio. If there's good dialogue, I drop a marker and write down what they're saying. It's almost like transcribing, but it helps me. If I see a good shot, like the bridge they usually pass under, I'll mark that with a different color. My shots and dialogue are color-coordinated, which makes it easy. The main marker document lists all the colors, so if I'm only looking for shots, I just look for my shot markers.

I'll start marking things up. For example, let's say I'm marking up a catch, which is the most important element of the show. People watch for the fish fights. A fish fight can last anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours, even nine hours in a season. We once had a nine-hour catch.

You're still watching the audio because sometimes the fish is just pulling, and there's a stalemate where they're not really talking. You learn things as you get really familiar with the footage. I've been on the show for a long time, so it's almost second nature now.

I mark up the catch and then start cutting it down. Let's say a catch took four hours; I need to condense that into 20 minutes or less. Based on the story elements and what I've already seen, if it's an episode about rough weather, and the catch happens in the rain, I'll keep all the parts where they're talking about the rain. "Oh my god, it's so hard fighting this fish in the rain. I can't see anything. I'm soaking wet." That's what I keep in the fish fight. That's what's important and what people want to see, and what's pertinent to this episode.

So, things like "Oh my god, the rain! I can't see it with the waves," all of that is the type of stuff I keep in. I've condensed those four hours into 20 minutes and make sure it looks good. I ensure that the shots transition smoothly and don't jump around. I don't polish it like a final editor, but I make sure shots match and there's a consistent flow. If someone moved here, then they move back – at least that kind of continuity.

I have this 20-minute sequence, and I pass it off to work on another scene from the day. Was it them steaming out and setting up for the day? Was it them checking in in the afternoon, saying, "Oh, we really want a bite. We're going to check our baits. We're going to do this"? Any type of process, as we call it, I start working on that. That's basically the process I do for pretty much the entire day, for any moment in the day that we could use as a scene.

Even if it's not pertinent to this weather scene, I kind of save it for another episode because we are going to use it. We go through all of our footage and use it in one way or another. So, if I don't use it for this episode, I save it for another one. I'm constantly working with the current episode at hand but also thinking ahead for future episodes. That's kind of my day-to-day.

I might get a request from an editor, like, "Hey, I need you to find me the shot. I really need a nighttime shot, full moon, them doing this one very specific thing because I have this shot and this shot, and I need to connect it with this." Those are really difficult sometimes because it could be really, really specific and very hard to find. I could spend five hours looking for a shot for someone, and it gets really frustrating. But it happens. Sometimes it's just the nature of the game. But that's a typical day.