The edit of their films have begun. Now is when the fruit of their effort becomes clear to them. To explain to a blind person that a film edit comprises of shots of the same incident but from different camera positions is challenge. Why don't we just use one establishing shot that contains all the action and dialogue? We could, but then there wouldn't be much difference between us and Bollywood.

The beauty of the camera is that it can go places and offer us different perspectives of the same happening. For the Rakum students it was a revelation to see a sequence of movements, actions and dialogue being pieced together from different camera positions and angles. Our goal was not to get the blind to understand how video editing software worked, but to illustrate how a film is created a third time during the edit.

While they could not initially 'see' how this worked, we explained how every shot had an 'in' point and an 'out' point during the edit. Using the analogy of the foot ruler with 12 inches, we asked them to imagine they wanted to use footage from the 4th inch and onward, leaving out the 'action' call. So they set the 'in' point at the 4th. If they liked everything up to the 9th inch, they set the 'out' point there. The software took care of hiding the rest.

Next came the question, why should we use the 4th inch and up to the 9th inch? Well, that's the filmmaker's choice. If they want to show a character talking animatedly up to a certain point in the conversation and cut to a reaction of a listener at that point in the dialogue, they could. Its what gives a viewer different perspectives of the same incident and connects them to all the characters as the incident unfolds.

That 's the beauty of the edit. The filmmaker decides (if he or she can edit) what goes in the film, who the story is about and how to get the supporting characters, and visual elements to portray the story they envision. All this can truly be controlled during the edit. And nobody got that better than the Rakum kids. They had written their stories, knew the characters very well, had memorized each characters lines and understood when to cut and to whom to convey their story best.

Editing is on-going. Four more films to cut. Stay tuned. More in February when we finish the edit and begin setting music.