The Practical Guide to Documentary Editing

Techniques for TV and Film

Sam Billinge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351870108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Practical Guide to Documentary Editing sets out the techniques, the systems and the craft required to edit compelling professional documentary television and film. Working stage by stage through the postproduction process, author Sam Billinge explores project organization, assembling rushes, sequence editing, story structure, music and sound design, and the defining relationship between editor and director.

Written by a working documentary editor with over a decade's worth of experience cutting films for major British and international broadcasters, The Practical Guide to Documentary Editing offers a unique introduction to the craft of documentary editing, and provides working and aspiring editors with the tools to master their craft in the innovative and fast-paced world of contemporary nonfiction television and film.

1
The Fundamentals

Storytelling 1.0

“The shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.”

—Anthony de Mello¹

Storytelling is the most powerful and enduring means of communication. It has been fundamental to the development of society as far back as human history can be traced. As individuals too, many of our early learning experiences are likely to have involved stories through the spoken and written word, as well as through creative role-play. Even before we had the ability to articulate our thoughts and feelings in written form, we learned to make sense of the world through stories.

As a result of this early conditioning, it seems that we all have an in-built understanding of story. When we watch a film, it is the story that speaks to us most immediately, and so it follows that it is the story that is the single most important aspect of any film.

In order for a film to be great, it must have a compelling story to tell—and that story must be told in the most effective way possible. As editors, we cannot always choose the stories we are given, but we can help to shape them and thereby influence both their reception and impact. We can help structure and clarify the narrative through the arrangement of events and the careful inclusion and exclusion of content, and we can strengthen its impact through the imaginative use of pictures, sound and music. We can also regulate the ebb and flow of the story through our choice of pacing and rhythm.

Since the central narrative message is the key to all great documentary making, the editor’s primary focus must be first to understand the story in all its depth (what is this film about?) and with all its nuances (what points of view can be brought to it?) and then decide how best to tell it. Every subsequent aspect of editing is built on this foundation.

Establishing the Story Foundations

“Confl ict is to storytelling what sound is to music”

—Robert McKee²

Nearly all successful stories, from the earliest folk tales to the latest block-buster films, appear to share a singular common feature: a narrative arc that begins with a conflict between people or situations and ends in a successful resolution. This ‘formula’ appears to satisfy some deep-seated human need to find order in disorder, harmony in discord and sense in confusion: a pathway through the woods, as it were, to the beckoning light of home. This desire, to be presented first with contradictions and then with reconciliation determines whether we find stories gripping and/or their conclusions satisfactory. Stories without conflict lack interest whilst conflicts without resolution leave us either disappointed or distressed. It follows then that conflict is the driving force of all good stories and that every story must involve conflict of some kind.

John Yorke, speaking primarily of cinema and theatre, describes this archetypal story form in the following way:

A protagonist is introduced with a goal, a desire with which the audience can easily sympathize, and then an antagonist is introduced, as an individual or a representative of an opposing force, standing in his or her way. The movie becomes their confl ict, and its sequences become the more or less linear escalation of that struggle, the cowboy with the gunfighter, the lovers with parents opposing…. This seamless confl ict built to a third-act confrontation—the climax—and ended with a resolution that fit the mode, death in a tragedy and marriage, most typically, in a comedy.³

In documentary, this conflict usually comes between a character (the presenter, interview subject and/or other contributors to the film) and his or her physical or social world, within his or her personal relationships or within himself or herself. Since documentary is a highly visual and linear medium, we tend to focus on external conflict which we can readily see, that is, inter-personal conflict or conflict with the physical or social world.

In Man on Wire,⁴ high-wire daredevil Philippe Petit (protagonist), hears about the planned construction of the World Trade Center and is seized by the idea of tightrope walking between the two towers (his goal). He plans the stunt for six years, away from the authorities who threaten to derail his plan (forces of antagonism). Philippe experiences many challenges in reaching his goal: how he will gain access to the building, scale his way to the top and get the heavy wire across the two buildings—as well as the various natural forces which threaten the success of the crossing itself (the escalation of the struggle). Despite these challenges, Philippe makes the crossing (the climax) and becomes something of a star, making history in the process (the resolution).

This notion of conflict inspires our journey through the film and stimulates our quest to resolve it. This search for resolution then determines the places we go, what our audience will see and what they will learn. Understanding this conflict takes us through time and eventually on to the finale, where the conflict is resolved, and where we, in turn, reach our conclusion. The journey will make our characters and our audience change the ways in which they see the world.

The path to resolution is rarely singular and never without alternatives: during the production process, and even more so at the start of the edit, there is usually a wide (sometimes bewildering) range of possibilities for the film.

The director is likely to have grappled already with this near infinite number of possibilities and, using both instinct and careful research, will have boiled things down to just a few. He or she will arrive at the edit with a fairly robust, yet broadly untested, idea of the direction in which they would like to take the story. This is where the editor’s contribution usually begins.

The editor must help decide the direction in which to take the story from here on, choosing what to include, and crucially, what must be excluded to make the narrative clear and compelling. This can seem a daunting prospect at first. Fortunately, we can break down the decision-making process into a logical series of steps.

• First ask, what is the film about?
  We need to understand the nature of our story and the conflict within it. This is what our film is about. We should be able to describe this in a sentence or two. The result is referred to as the central argument. Every aspect of the film will hang from and depend upon this argument.
  Understanding our film’s central argument at the beginning of the project, and keeping this in mind throughout the edit, will help keep our efforts focused and maintain clarity in our thinking. Every decision we make should be seen through this conceptual ‘lens.’
• Next ask, what are the scenes about?
  Once we know what this conflict is, we must attempt to understand the various tests and experiences our characters will need to go through to resolve it. Each of these tests will form the basis of our scenes.
  I usually find that each scene tends to work best when it addresses just a single significant aspect of the film’s central argument at a time: illustrating one part of the challenge faced by our characters, testing their ability to measure up to that challenge and, ultimately, motivating them to change their stance or understanding. This change makes them stronger, taking them (and the audience, too) from a place of relative ignorance to a position of knowledge. This new-found knowledge provides us with the ‘piece of the puzzle’ we need to move on to the next step of the journey—the next scene and then the next—incrementally building the wherewithal to resolve the central conflict and, in so doing, allowing protagonist and audience alike to reach a satisfying conclusion.
  This path through the film is often referred to as the story arc.
  Having said this, it is clear that the documentary editor cannot always be successful in giving the audience all of the answers. Often a super-ficially simple story can become more complex and irresolvable as it progresses. Indeed this discovered complexity may become the foundation of the whole story. For this reason, not all films can have a satisfying or unambiguous conclusion, since the events which may eventually lead to that conclusion may not yet have taken place. However, upon reaching their own—perhaps interim—conclusion, documentary editors can be said to have given the audience the wherewithal to form more informed and detailed views of the subject for themselves. This broader accomplishment can in turn provoke a new way of looking at the subject and ultimately our world.
  Finally, there are instances where more than one aspect of the film’s central argument may play out within a single scene. For example, in an observational documentary that follows the life of a character intimately, a scene of mother and daughter preparing an evening meal might, for instance, illustrate multiple aspects of their relationship—wealth, health-consciousness and any number of things.
  It remains the case, however, that we are attempting as best we can to keep each scene as simple and connected to the broader story arc as possible.
• Next we must consider, how does the film end?
  Logically, our film ends when we have successfully brought resolution to the conflict identified at its beginning. As filmmakers, we will have taken our audience on a journey from a place of relative confusion, uncertainty or ambiguity (conflict) to a place of relative certainty (resolution) by equipping them with the wherewithal to know how to resolve the conflict in their own minds. This may not take the form of a definitive answer arising inevitably from the story as told, but rather a clear suggestion of a direction toward which the audience might look to find the answer for themselves. When both are satisfied we have reached the end of our film.
  However, it is not often clear at the beginning of the edit how the film will end. Documentary story is often shaped by unpredictable forces. The weather or other unforeseen events may determine what directors are able to shoot, adversely affecting the availability of on-screen contributors, or rendering inaccessible a required location. Each and any one of these may alter the intended narrative and compromise the materials available to the editor. As a result, documentaries are rarely scripted prior to the edit with any great precision. Only once the rushes are in the can and the edit begins, are we in a position to evaluate what we really have to work with and decide where to take the film.
  However, once we are in the edit and we have established where the source of conflict in our story lies, we can begin to establish relatively quickly where the conclusion to this conflict is likely to be found. At this stage, there may still not be a single clear path to our much sought resolution: rather several possible routes. Even so, we must establish some notion of an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Preface
• The Power of Documentary
• Who Are Film Editors and What Do They Do?
• 1. The Fundamentals
• 2. Starting to Edit
• 3. Picture Editing
• 4. Sound Editing
• 5. Story Structure
• The Cutting Room Relationship
• Workflow Summary
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index