Editing: Process and Procedures

Computerized editing software such as Avid^®, Final Cut Pro^®, and Adobe^® Premiere^®, among others, has become ubiquitous. The early established Avid system (Figure 13-1) remains the front runner in performance and user friendliness but has been legendarily expensive to maintain because of the company’s habit of requiring frequent, expensive updates. A clear advantage of Avid’s low-end product is that the keystrokes you learn remain the same throughout Avid’s range, and this will be a benefit should good fortune take you upmarket.

Many independent filmmakers prefer Apple’s Final Cut Pro (Figure 13-2), a stable and modestly priced program that handles everything you can expect of it with aplomb. The Apple operating system seems better integrated than the PC, which depends on Windows^® and its notorious peccadilloes.

FIGURE 13-2 Apple^® Final Cut Pro^® editing software on a PowerBook^® portable computer. (Photo courtesy of Apple, Inc.)

Crew Dailies Viewing Session

Even if everyone has viewed dailies piecemeal, let the crew see their work in its entirety after shooting ends. It’s useful for everyone to see their patterns and mistakes, not just the successful material that makes it into the final edit. The editor might attend this viewing, but discussion is likely to be a crew-centered postmortem that is not especially useful to editing.

Editor and Director’s Viewing Session

If nothing has yet been edited, the director and editor should see all the dailies together. This reveals the general thrust of the material and the problems that you face for the piece as a whole. The longer and more ambitious the film, the more challenges and possibilities lie in the material. For you, the director, this is a stressful time. Often you are in the grip of depression over a sense of failed goals, and your mind is working furiously as you try to see a way out. What you mainly see is problems. Maybe you see irritating mannerisms in one of the participants that you never noticed, and these must be cut around if he is not to appear shifty. Or one of your two main characters is more interesting and articulate, and you must rethink your original premise.

View all of the material again, scene by scene. You can easily see digitized dailies in likely scene order rather than shooting order. Stop to discuss each scene’s problems and possibilities.

Taking Notes

The editor or the editor’s proxy keeps notes about the director’s choices and any special cutting information. It’s useful to have someone present whose only function is to take notes, but if you must write during a viewing, make large, scribbled notes on many pages of paper. That way your eyes never leave the screen. If you look away, you will undoubtedly miss important moments and nuances.

Gut Feelings Matter

Note all emotional high points or unexpected outcomes. These contain the clues pointing toward a successful film. You must work out where they come from and what they signify. Almost certainly these moments of delivery are so significant that they represent the mainstays of the future film. Note any unexpected moods or feelings. If you find yourself reacting with, “She seems unusually sincere here” or “I can’t believe that really happened,” then note it down. One often doubts that gut feelings are really founded in anything, and you are apt to ignore, then forget, them. But seldom are these isolated personal reactions. What triggered them is embedded in the material and will strike any first-time audience. Later, all the spontaneous perceptions you recorded will be useful when inspiration lags from overfamiliarity.

Reactions

When the crew (or anyone else for that matter) sees dailies, there will be useful debates over the effectiveness, meaning, or importance of different aspects of the material. Crew members often harbor differing feelings about participants’ credibility and motivation. During the filming they often develop partisan feelings about the participants and filming situations. Listen to their opinions but don’t argue, because similar thoughts may occur to your future audience. At any viewing you will learn most from sitting at the back and watching viewers’ body language. You need to know their thoughts, feelings, and observations, but keep in mind that crew members, like you, are far from objective. They are highly involved in their own discipline, tend to often overvalue its positive or negative effects, and don’t see the film from a director’s or editor’s perspective. The sum of the dailies viewing is a notebook full of the director’s and the editor’s choices and observations and fragmentary impressions of the movie’s potential and deficiencies.

The Only Film is in the Dailies

Now the director changes hats. No longer are you the instigator of the material; instead, you and your editor are surrogates for the audience. Purge yourself of prior knowledge and intentions; all understanding and feeling must arise wholly from the screen. Nobody in the cutting room wants to hear about what you intended or what you could have produced.

Logging the Dailies

FIGURE 13-5 Examples of timecode listings.

The handwritten log of dailies should be cumulative, noting the timecode for each new scene, important action, or event. Timecode is the unique, time-related number assigned by the camera to each video frame at the time of shooting; it becomes the ID by which the editing program handles everything. Figure 13-5 shows the editing program’s list of shots that your notes will give relevant details for. Keep descriptions brief—they need only remind you what to expect. For example:

The figures are hours:minutes:seconds. Timecode includes a frame count, but such hair-splitting accuracy in a content log is usually pointless. The example explains all the standard shot abbreviations except the last. In England, the expression for “shot without sound” is “mute,” but America still enshrines its German immigrant directors’ call of “Mit out sound!” which is abbreviated MOS.

Place each new sequence in a designated bin having a distinctive title, as in Figure13-3. If the software’s log lacks space for qualitative notes, keep them on paper. Logs, bins, and shot descriptions exist to help you locate material quickly, so on a longer production you will want to design divisions, indexes, or color codes to assist your eye and save time. Inadequate filing always exacts its own revenge because Murphy (of Murphy’s Law) loves to hide out in sloppy filing systems.

Making Transcripts and a Workaround Solution

Tedious though it sounds, transcribing every word your participants speak is invaluable to grasping what they mean. If your film is about court testimony, say, people’s actual words will be paramount and transcribing them unavoidable. Chapter 31, From Transcript to Filmscript, describes how to make a whole first assembly from edited transcripts. Transcribing is not as laborious or unrewarding as people fear; it saves work later and helps ensure that you miss few creative opportunities. If you can’t bring yourself to do this, then log topic categories. That is, instead of writing down actual words, summarize the topics covered at each scene or interview and then log these by approximate timecode in and out points. Now you have quick access to any given subject, but later you’ll have to make decisions during editing by auditioning whole sections. Not making transcripts is a “buy now, pay later” situation, because making content and choice comparisons without a transcript is hard labor of a different stripe.

Using transcripts too literally has some dangers. You can place too much emphasis on words and thus make a speech-driven film. Then again, speech that looks significant on paper sometimes proves anemic on the screen. This is because the act of transcription always to some degree imposes an artificial and literary organization—the more so if the original scene took place impulsively and chaotically. Also, how something is said is quite as important as what is being said. When voices overlap, or people use special nuances or body language, transcripts often mislead by simplifying reality. What is lived and how someone transcribes it may carry quite different subtexts.

Why Structure Matters

If you were able to realize your goals during the shoot, structuring the assembly may be straightforward. More often—since documentaries are usually improvisations about people improvising their way through life—what you shoot is not what you imagined. Your goals were frustrated or had to change, so now you need a new planning process that will make use of what you actually filmed. Editing is your second chance to direct.

Time and Structural Alternatives

Identifying a structure for your footage means, first of all, deciding how to handle time, since temporal progression is an all-important organizing feature. In what order should you show cause and effect? Are there advantages in altering the natural or chronological sequence of events? Can you use parallel storytelling to run two narratives concurrently? All of this affects the contract you will strike with your audience.

The Contract

Yes, your audience expects a contract — an indication in the film’s first moments of the story’s premise, goals, and route. You may spell it out in narration or imply it in the logic of the film’s development. You may signal it by the film’s title or by something shown, said, or done at the outset.

You’ll find longer film structural types with examples in Part 7, Advanced Production Issues: Chapter 18, Dramatic Development, Time, and Story Structure. The examples and discussion there may further help you decide what limitations or potential lie in your dailies. Ways to analyze your film and find alternative structures appear in Chapter 34, Editing: Refinements and Structural Problems.

Story Structures Need Development

A problem for many documentaries is that, unless the film is shot over months or years, development must be implied rather than shown because most human change is too slow for an affordable shooting schedule. Michael Apted’s 28 Up (1986, United Kingdom) and the other longitudinal studies it has inspired are strikingly successful because they log progress over decades, and for once really explore each person’s sense of goals and destiny.

Now that many documentarians have their own equipment, longitudinal films have become more feasible. Intermittent filming is also something that independents can do more easily than corporations.

How will your film imply that someone has grown or changed?

Microcosm and Macrocosm

Sometimes a subject is large and diffuse, and you have to imply what is happening through examples in microcosm. I once worked on a series that attempted to show aspects of France while Britain was joining the Common Market (now called the European Union). Our series, “Faces of Paris,” showed aspects of the French by profiling interesting individuals.

Here we faced a paradox: I can’t show all of France, so maybe I should confine myself to Paris, but “Paris” is too diffuse, so I should concentrate on representative Parisians to give my film some unity and progression. But how typical is any Parisian? Trying to represent the universal, one looks for an example in the particular, but this only demonstrates how triumphantly atypical all examples really are. Making generalizations in the relentlessly specific medium of film can be a real problem. Indeed, this may signal that you should bite the bullet and consider narration.

Writers faced, and solved, similar problems in previous centuries. One solution may be to find a naturalistic subject that carries strongly metaphorical overtones. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is a journey of adventure, but it also functions as an allegory for the human spiritual voyage. The Maysles brothers’ superb Salesman (1969), mentioned earlier in Chapter 5, shows every phase of door-to-door selling, which was something the brothers had done themselves at one time. It also dramatizes how moral compromise and humiliation can be the price of competing for a share in the American dream.

Another famous American director repeatedly uses an allegorical “container” structure. Fred Wiseman will take an institution and treat it as a complete and functioning microcosm of the larger society that houses it. Through the emergency room doors in Hospital (1970) come, for example, the hurt, the wounded, the drug-overdosed, and the dying in desperate search of succor. It yields a frightful vision of the self-destruction stalking American cities and threatening the American psyche. Yet, the same “institution as walled city” idea applied in High School (1968, United States; Figure 13-6) seems diffuse and directionless. The relationship Wiseman wants us to notice between teachers and the taught is too low key, repetitive, and unremarkable to build much sense of development. His noninterventional approach and lack of narration or interviews left him with no tools to develop and intensify what I presume is the vital issue—that an average American high school is extraordinarily autocratic and prepares young people better for the military than to participate in a democracy. He would retort, I think, that it’s my job to work it out. This is true.

Don’t imagine that today’s technology has reduced a storyteller’s apprenticeship. Your models for strong narratives lie in expertise developed over centuries in all the time arts. Understand their achievements and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel.

FIGURE 13-6 High School—no place to learn democracy. (Photo courtesy of Zipporah Films, Inc.)

Finding an Action-Determined Structure

If you have plenty of action and visual sequences, put together an assembly using only observational material and then view it as a whole and without stopping:

1. What does this material convey? Does it, for example, tell a story, convey a mood, introduce a society, or set an epoch?
2. What time period do you know your material spans, and how well does the assembly convey that lapse of time? (It’s always useful for events to happen in a set period of time.)
3. What memorable interchanges or developments did you capture on camera? This, of course, is probably your strongest and most persuasive “evidence.”
4. What would your film convey if it were a silent film? (This is the acid test by which to see whether any film is cinematic rather than literary or theatrical.)
5. How many phases or chapters does the material fall into, and what characterizes each?
6. What verbal material, as yet unused, could you use that adds new dimensions to the “silent film” assembly above?
7. What new dimensions does the original action-based and behaviorally based film acquire? (Make a new working hypothesis.)
8. How little speech material do you need to further shift the film toward something you want?

Beginning from visual and behavioral evidence lets imagery suggest the story. Beginning from words means that words take control. But by bringing few words to your behavioral assembly and perhaps by using voice-over rather than “talking heads,” you are developing characters who seem to be speaking from their interior lives rather than addressing an interviewer.

Finding a Speech-Based Narrative Structure

If you start by assembling interviews, your film is probably a historical retrospective or one about the present that scans many people’s viewpoints. You will find the best word-driven structure through making a paper edit from transcripts (see Part 7, Advanced Production Issues: Chapter 31, From Transcript to Film Script).

Screening the First Assembly and Return to Innocence

To judge a first assembly, try to purge all foreknowledge from your mind or you won’t see with the eyes of a first-time viewer. This unobstructed, audience-like way of viewing is necessary every time you run your film. To this end, it’s always helpful to have one or two people present for whom the movie is new. As we said earlier, sit behind them and study their body language for clues. Even when they don’t utter a word, newcomers somehow give filmmakers fresh eyes.

During the first assembly, and certainly after it, your material will start telling you where and how to cut. This signals a welcome and slightly mysterious change in your role from proactive to reactive. Formerly, you had to expend energy to get anything done, and now the energy starts to come from the film itself.

Deciding an Ideal Length

As your creation comes to life, you will find the process profoundly exciting. First viewings will yield important realizations about the character, dramatic shape, and best length of the film. You should have a particular length in mind, depending on the medium. Television usually has quite rigid specifications; for example, a 30-minute PBS or BBC slot requires a film (including titles) of about 28 minutes, 30 seconds, to allow for announcements at either end. Television documentaries usually appear as a series because audiences come to associate a particular time with particular programs. Films are thus either funded as packages and coproductions or acquired for showing under a series title, such as “Independent Lens” or “POV.” If your movie were to appear on commercial television, it would have to be broken up into segments of perhaps 5 minutes with so-called natural breaks to allow for commercials.

Thus, the outlet for your film determines its length and structure:

• Classroom films are normally 10 to 20 minutes.
• Television uses 30-, 40- (in Europe), 60-, and 90-minute slots.
• Short films that say a lot have a better chance of acceptance on the festival circuit, where reputations are created. They also appeal to those who browse the Internet.
• Internet videos such as those on YouTube ™ are usually under 10 minutes. Most exhibit the interests, skills, and naï veté of home movies—which is essentially what they are. Home movies can still be an art form.
• When the Internet is able to deliver full fidelity, longer and more substantial pieces will inevitably take over; however, only those developing commitment, storytelling, and craft sophistication will find large audiences.
• Newspaper videos (see www.mefeedia.com) are often just 45 seconds and are generally amateurish in every respect. See the Digital Journalist article for pointers regarding what not to do (www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0805/how-not-to-do-newspaper-video.html). The skills you develop from using this book diligently should put you way ahead.

Look to the content of your film for guidance on length. Sit on a jury, and you’ll see that most documentaries are at least a third too long. Your immersion while shooting makes you a poor judge of length, so seek advice. A film’s natural span depends on the richness and significance of its content, and, to a lesser extent, the expectations people will have depending on where they see it. Audiences for television, cable, community cable, cinema, or YouTube bring different expectations. Where does your project really belong? If you can recognize that your film has 10 minutes of content, then you can get tough with that earnest 25-minute assembly and shape it for its most likely audience.

Diagnostic Questioning

Immediately after viewing an assembly, scribble a list of material that made the most impact. You’re going to use this a little later. Dealing with your film in its crudest form, you must now elicit your own dominant reactions. After the first viewing, ask:

• Does the film feel dramatically balanced? That moving and exciting sequence in the middle of the film may be making the rest of the film seem anticlimactic. Or your film may circle around for a long while before it really starts moving.
• When do you sense a story unfolding, and when not? This helps locate impediments in the film’s development and sets you analyzing why the film stumbles.
• Which parts of the film seem to work, which drag, and why?
• Which participants held your attention and which didn’t? Some may be more congenial or just better on camera than others.
• Was there a satisfying alternation of types of material? Or was similar material clumped indigestibly together? Where did you get effective contrasts and juxtapositions? Can you make more? Variety is as important in storytelling as in dining.
• Does the audience get too much or too little expository information? Sometimes a sequence fails to work because the ground was not properly prepared, or because it fails to contrast in mood sufficiently with the previous sequence.
• Exposition
  • Can it be delayed? Too much too early deluges viewers with information about people and issues they don’t yet care about.
  • Is there too much? This reduces the will to concentrate by removing all anticipatory tension in the viewer.
  • Is it too clumped? Consider thinning or holding back expository material until it’s really needed. Make the audience work—they enjoy it.
• What kinds of metaphysical allusions does your material make? Could you make more use of connotation and metaphor? Are you signaling the film’s values and beliefs sufficiently?

What Works, what Doesn’t

Take your impact list made immediately after the first viewing and compare it with a full sequence list. The human memory discards what it doesn’t find meaningful, so you forgot all that good stuff in the full list because it fails to deliver. This doesn’t mean it can never work, only that it’s not working yet. Common reasons for material to misfire:

• Two or more sequences are making the same point. Repetition does not advance an argument unless there is escalation. Make choices, ditch the redundant.
• A climax is in the wrong place. If your stronger material is early, the film becomes anticlimactic.
• Tension builds then slackens. Plot your movie’s rising and falling emotional temperatures; if it inadvertently cools before an intended peak, the viewer’s response is seriously impaired. Sometimes transposing sequences works wonders.
• The film raises false expectations. A film, or part thereof, fails when you don’t deliver what the viewer has been led to expect.
• Good material is somehow lost on the audience. We read into film according to the context. A misleading setup or a failure to direct attention to the right places can make material fall flat.
• You have multiple endings. Decide what your film is really about and prune accordingly.