When I cut my first documentary feature, I realised that as difficult as editing a feature-length fiction film might be, editing a documentary is ten times harder. With a fiction film, building your assembly involves sitting down every day, loading up the project, opening up the script, and constructing the next scene on your list. As the days and weeks go by, you have more and more scenes assembled until you put them all together and suddenly you have a whole film!
With a documentary, it’s not uncommon to have no more than a handful of notes or a few pages of a pitch document explaining what the film is intended to be about. Then you will have dozens, perhaps even hundreds of hours of footage which it’s going to take you weeks just to watch, let alone begin to edit. Before long, you’re weeks into a project, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the task ahead of you, and wondering how you seem to have so little to show for the time you’ve so far invested. So, how do you go from sitting down on the first day of your documentary edit to being able to sit back and watch your first cut?
“Editing a documentary is akin to someone handing you a bag of sentences and asking you to write a book.”
— Travis Swartz, Producer
Get Organized
The first thing to do is to make sure that your material is organized. It’s so easy to drown in the hours and hours of material you might have. At this point you might not know much about what the footage contains if you’re editing something you didn’t shoot, but you still need to come up with a system to impose some order on the footage.
I talk here (link) about how to organise your project when cutting fiction. A lot of this applies to a documentary project, although as you’ve probably gathered by now, often doc material that has little to no organisational system in the way the scene-slate-take numbers of a fiction project give you an obvious guide.
What you can do is to organise your footage by day. Although this really means nothing to you the editor, Directors and Producers will often reference the day something was shot on (“we shot it the day after so-and-so”), so it’s useful to put your cards into dated folders. You can then add locations to those folder names if your film has been shot in multiple locations.
If you have a mix of characters and contributors it can be useful to group all their footage together. Or if there is some other obvious way in which the material could be arranged. Location? Event?
The uniqueness of your project will probably lead to a unique organisational system, but I would encourage you to develop a structure for your project that is simple, deep (ie using lots of sub-folders rather than dozens of top-level folders), and as obvious as possible to someone who has no idea what it contains.
Watching your Material
The next step is to begin what feels like the extremely long-winded and time-consuming process of watching your material. It IS time-consuming, but totally necessary. The more you know the material, the more able you are to understand what’s there and how you can potentially shape it.
While on an unscripted TV documentary series you’re very unlikely to be able to watch more than a fraction of the material, there will be others in your team who will have been present during the shoot, or will be familiar with a written breakdown of the material, and so you will most likely be directed towards certain material and asked to shape, or try shaping it, in a particular way. If you’re working on an independent doc, it’s far more common to be able to work as a co-director on the film, and so you’ll need to know the material as fully as possible.
While watching, you’ll want to make notes. These can be on paper, or within your NLE itself. The advantage of adding notes to the NLE is that they stay attached to the material, meaning you don’t have to sort through pages and pages of notes whenever you approach a new section of material during the edit.
When you’re watching your material, you’re essentially looking for two things: what’s interesting, and what’s useful. Of course something can be both, but ideally you’re recording the interesting or the useful.
I tend to build selects sequences, either constructed from moments I like within the raw material, or whittled down from a raw sequence. Other editors will look to whittle the rushes down, removing unusable material until they have something more manageable.
Finding a Shape
Once you have material that you feel is starting to speak to you and suggest how it might form scenes, the next step is to begin thinking about structure.
Perhaps there is already an outline from your Director, or perhaps the events of the film happened in an obvious chronology. Initially building things chronologically can provide a relatively time efficient way of building something coherent, although depending on your subject, a chronological approach may make either complete sense, or may on reflection feel inappropriate, or simply boring (you will especially find this with biographical subjects).
I tend to start either with the ending, or the beginning.
If starting with the ending, we first need to choose a scene which feels like it might make an appropriate ending. Often this is a scene which feels like it captures the themes of the film in a particularly strong way, or concludes the film’s course of events. Once you have this scene in place, you can then starting thinking backwards. “If this is where our story concludes, what do we need to happen to get here?”.
Whether you already have an ending or not, there are a few helpful ways in which you can think about your opening.
The beginning of a film usually introduces the viewer to the world of the film. You can also consider the questions a viewer may be asking: What is the film about? Who is it about? Where are we? I find it is often very useful to take this Who/What/Where/When approach to a film’s early minutes.
Of course, you’re not simply looking to lay out information, or answer questions, you mostly want to be asking questions. However you’re approaching the film stylistically, most films will look to hook or intrigue viewers in some way. A big part of your work as an Editor is in ensuring that viewers want to continue watching, whether you’re working on a YouTube video, or a feature doc for cinema release.
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