■ Where to Begin?

It is our sincere hope that you have been thinking about questions of style (Chapter 2) and structure (Chapter 3) throughout your production process. It is likely that your initial ideas and assumptions have been revised, along with your hypothesis (Chapter 1), many times as you have been shooting. At this point, you should have at least a provisional sense of what elements you will incorporate, including whether you will be building observational scenes, using narration, creating animation or graphics, and so on. You may also already have a sense of the overall story arc and how different characters and events will fit into the trajectory of your film. But as you’ll see below, postproduction is an opportunity to rethink that structure. Here are some guidelines based on our experiences editing our own work and helping students structure their films.

■ Story Elements: Character, Exposition, and Plot

As we discussed in Chapter 3, the momentum of any film is generated through conflict. People have goals. Obstacles stand in the way. Their effort to overcome these obstacles and achieve their goals moves the story forward. Layered with the characters’ stories is the presentation of issues and the audience’s unfolding understanding of the situation, whether it is a global financial crisis, a lack of affordable housing, or an artistic career that has stalled.

You, as the filmmaker, know everything (in fact, much more than will ever be in your film). But structure is how you will tell the story: the flow of ideas, the revealing of details one at a time to make a compelling narrative. Structure is also about creating mystery, suspense, or a “need to know” before you give the viewer pieces of information. It’s a bit like playing a hand of cards. You have an ace. Your best approach to the game is rarely to lay it out during the first round. Similarly, as a filmmaker, you should consider what the most compelling points you have to make are, and plan to bring those in judiciously, at strategic moments over the course of the film.

When you get to the edit room, you have already done your best to film compelling characters, events, and interviews that you hope will deliver a strong story. Now it is time to think about how you will weave those elements together, and craft your dramatic arc in the most specific way you can. Classic screenwriting texts talk about the three elements of story: character, exposition, and plot. While this idea comes from dramatic writing, and many documentaries seem more about information than drama, the idea is useful. However you conceptualize the people and events you’re focusing on, you will always need a balance between these story elements. Ideally, any sequence in your film will contain all three. Character refers to the personality, aspirations, and internal conflicts of the people in your film. In some cases, this will include the filmmaker. Exposition is information the viewer needs in order to follow the story. This background information is often essential, but you always run the risk of stopping the flow of the film when you introduce it. A key aspect of good storytelling is figuring out how to fit in exposition without impeding the forward momentum of your story. And plot, the actual “what happens,” is at the heart of dramatic storytelling. In a documentary, of course, the events are not ones that you dream up while sitting at your laptop. They come from the real world, as do the subjects you are filming. While certain other elements, like reenactments, can be created, by and large these real people and their real actions define what you have to work with.

■ Figure 18.1 Kim and Scott, the main characters of Trouble the Water, as we first meet them at the New Orleans Superdome two weeks after Hurricane Katrina.

Trouble the Water (2008) is an Academy Award^®-nominated documentary by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. It follows two residents of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, Kim and Scott Roberts, as they deal with the aftermath of Superstorm Katrina and the institutional racism and indifference that threaten to destroy their lives and those of their families and neighbors. The film has all the basics of a good story: characters who want something, barriers that get in the way, conflict, and high stakes. What is valuable to see in this film is how elegantly its combines its plot, its characters, and its exposition.

The film starts with the crew meeting Kim and Scott at the New Orleans Superdome, a sports arena turned refugee shelter, shortly after Hurricane Katrina has destroyed New Orleans (Figure 18.1). It then flashes back two weeks to home footage taken by Kim as she documented the arrival of the storm with a new video camera.

One of the reasons Trouble the Water is such a gripping film is because of the way it deals with character. The main subjects—Kim, Scott, and Kim’s brother Larry—are presented as people with rich and complex inner lives, as well as people who are facing severe external conflicts. They come to terms with themselves as they deal with Katrina. We see them rescuing people from the water and giving them shelter. We see them concerned about pets. We see them “borrow” a truck and evacuate a large group of elderly people and children to an area in the north part of the state where they can get help. We find out that their struggles in life began long before Katrina. Kim’s mom was a crack addict who died of AIDS when Kim was 13. Both Kim and Scott dealt drugs. Part of their struggle is with their own past history, and it is a struggle they embrace. The filmmakers feed us this information slowly, allowing us to judge these people by what they do before we learn about their personal histories. For example, we only learn about Kim and Scott’s history of drug dealing toward the end of the film, when they see the possibility of a better life for themselves. This makes a powerful point in terms of the larger story, which seeks to portray the Katrina disaster as linked to a legacy of racism and poverty.

■ Figure 18.2 In the opening sequences of Trouble the Water, images of the mayor of New Orleans, radar image of Hurricane Katrina, and an aerial shot of the flooded city from news give exposition and contextualize the personal home video chronicle of the main subject, Kim.

Although the film is strongly character-based, it depends heavily on contextualizing Kim and Scott’s story within the larger catastrophe of Katrina. In the opening of Trouble the Water, we hear Kim as she shoots a home video and talks to her neighbors about whether they will stay for the storm or evacuate. This material is intercut with exposition in the form of television news material (Figure 18.2). We see a TV weather radar image of the storm swirling across the Gulf, and a shot of the jammed high ways leading out of the city. There is a press conference with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, where he urges citizens to evacuate. Then the filmmakers place a title over Nagin that says, “No public transportation is organized to evacuate the city.” The title is a rare example of the filmmakers using their own words to provide background information, and it gives us a clear sense of the film’s critical point of view. Then we return to Kim as she bicycles around the neighborhood. More news material indicates that there are some 100,000 residents who can’t get out of the city. Then we go back to Kim’s erratic camerawork and lively commentary. The contrast between her wildly swinging camera and the staid news material with its professional commentary both adds to a feeling of urgency and gives a sense that authorities are out of touch with the potential scope of the coming disaster.

This adroit mix of television news footage, Kim’s video, and the filmmakers’ own documentary material continues throughout the film. The combination makes it clear that this is not just a story of two people coping with a natural disaster; it is also a tale of how the natural disaster plays out in the society at large.

One good example of the relationship between plot, exposition, and character involves Kim’s grandmother. At the time of the storm, this elderly woman was in Memorial Medical Center, where the staff left the patients in their beds to die. The hospital story was major news nationally at the time of the storm, but it only enters the documentary’s storyline when Kim and Scott learn of the grandmother’s death from an uncle in another part of the state. Rather than front-loading the film with this information, the filmmakers let us find out about it as Kim and Scott do, making the film’s condemnation of this official negligence all the more powerful. This scene fills all three narrative functions—plot, character, and exposition—at the same time. On the level of plot, the film only reveals the grandmother’s story as Kim explains to a prison official that she needs to get her brother out of jail for the funeral. At this point, we find out not only about the grandmother’s death, but that Kim’s brother and other inmates were also trapped, in their cells without food, for days. This is brilliant plotting. On the level of character, Kim’s emerging strengths are visible in her concern for her brother, and her efforts to maintain family solidarity by getting him bailed out for the funeral. Finally, the scene gives major support to the overall theme: the official abdication of any responsibility for the welfare of the least powerful citizens during and after Katrina (Figure 18.3).

■ Figure 18.3 In this scene from Trouble the Water, Kim’s incarcerated brother is allowed to attend the funeral of their grandmother who died of neglect in a hospital abandoned by its staff, but only in chains.

Character and plot can function in many ways. Some films follow one character, while others follow multiple threads. Sometimes it’s best to tell each character’s story from beginning to end before embarking on another character’s journey. At other times, you will want to interweave the stories, cutting back and forth to reveal similarities and differences, allowing the stories to resonate with one another and contribute to a larger narrative. The important thing to recognize is that characters becomes plot as they deal with obstacles and try to achieve goals. How will she handle this moment? Will he even survive? Will the group break up in the face of crushing difficulties? Once we are invested in the characters’ lives, the answers to these questions become important and draw us into the world of the film.

■ Structural Elements: Observational Scenes, Interviews, and Visual Evidence

Once you’ve defined the big picture of your basic story, you’ll need to evaluate how to tell the story in the most cogent and poignant manner. This gives urgency to the need to evaluate your elements based on what you’ve learned about your material during the paper edit process (Chapter 17). As you build your film, you will find that some main points can be made using observational scenes, while others will be expressed through the interviews and the visual evidence you’ve collected. When you can, show rather than tell. Allow audiences to come to their own understanding by watching and evaluating the footage, rather than telling them the story and what it means. Other key information can be brought out through narration or text on screen. Remember, no one of these elements acts independently. Figuring out how they will interplay is key to structuring your work. Let’s look briefly at how different types of material play into structuring and writing your film.

Observational Scenes

Something is happening: a contentious town hall meeting, a firefight in the mountains of Afghanistan, a cargo plane taking off with a load of African carp, a couple fighting over the bills. Observational scenes like these are powerful because they put the viewer in the center of the action, as close to direct experience as you can get in a film. Observational scenes are the heart of many documentaries, and their presentation of events as they unfold allows the viewer to look at an aspect of the world and draw their own conclusions. These scenes can be handled in myriad ways, but how they reveal meaning is in your hands. Once you have a clear grasp of your story arc, you can start to make decisions about what the point being made by each scene will be, and start to cut to highlight that event and elucidate its meaning. Remember every scene will contain its own mini-drama that contributes to the whole. That doesn’t mean it is super-dramatic or intense, though it could certainly be. It does mean that it has new information that moves your story forward while offering a new perspective on a topic, and a chance for viewers to see your subjects in action. Just because something happened and you recorded it, is not a reason to put it into your film. Ask yourself, “What exactly is this scene about?” You should be able to answer that both in terms of what is happening literally, as well as be able to articulate its role in the larger argument or arc of your documentary. A scene that does not contribute to the overall meaning of the story, as charming as it may seem to you, or as difficult as it was to shoot, simply doesn’t belong in your film.

Lixin Fan spent several years filming with Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, the Sichuan couple whose life as migrants working in the sweatshops of Guangzhou is at the heart of the story of Last Train Home (2009). Their struggle to survive symbolizes that of millions of other Chinese peasants whose sacrifices keep the Chinese economy afloat. A key event, as the title of the film suggests, is the annual railroad journey from the coastal factories back to the rural provinces that are home to some 130 million migrant workers. It is the largest human migration on the planet. The moment is key, because it is here that the lives of the couple who are the film’s main subjects are linked visibly to the destinies of the other millions of workers that share their experience. Fan shot this event twice. The first time the couple tries to take “the last train” starts with a short scene about 8 minutes into the film. There are no tickets available (Figure 18.4). Then we see Changhua and Suqin eating a meal and discussing how tough it may be to get tickets. The feeling is subdued. We cut to a scene of the children and grandparents in the country waiting for them to arrive. Then, with only a few days left in the holiday period, we see Changhua checking at the cancellation office, and finally getting two returned tickets. Only at this point do things heat up, as the couple make a mad dash to get themselves and their luggage packed with presents onto the train.

■ Figure 18.4 Zhang Changhua learns that there are no tickets available for a Chinese New Year’s trip to his home village in an early scene from Last Train Home.

The next year, the couple’s recalcitrant daughter Qin has now joined her parents working on the coast. Once again the New Year arrives with the need to travel home. We think we know what to expect, but the station, which the year before was relatively quiet, is now surrounded by vast crowds. More and more people pile in, but no one leaves. There are police, then soldiers. People are crushed by the crowd. It becomes clear that there are hundreds of thousands of people at one train station, and not a single train is leaving. Over half a million people are stranded, and the family we are following, and the film crew, are stuck in the middle of this hell. Even though there is no real dialogue the camera offers us a window onto the world of the characters, and allows us to experience with them the vast scale of the human disaster as it unfolds (Figure 18.5). These two scenes, of the same event as it plays out very differently in two different years, reinforce one another and create the drama of the film. This is observational filmmaking at a high level.

While the value of some observational scenes may be obvious at the time of shooting, many scenes carry story in a way that may only become clear in postproduction. When you review your footage, stay attuned to small situations or moments that reveal underlying psychological drama. Sometimes something as small as a look or a comment muttered under someone’s breath can end up speaking volumes and provide the key event of a scene.

■ Figure 18.5 One of the climactic moments of Last Train Home, when the main characters find themselves stranded in a stampeding crowd of over half a million people waiting for trains at Guangzhou Station.

Visual Evidence

We’ve discussed the way that visual evidence works in other parts of this book, but remember that it is something to be thinking of all of the time as you build your story. An accumulation of detail enriches your film and helps build the case you are making.

In Trouble the Water, as the storm builds, we see the deserted Ninth Ward and get poignant visual details: children trying to play, and the first shingles getting ripped off a roof (Figure 18.6). As the rains come, we see the trees swirl and hear Kim pray. Then the camera goes to black. The next shot is accompanied only by the sound of moving water. It is an aerial shot of the broken levee, and it pulls out to reveal a city underwater, then it fades again to black, ending what is essentially the first act of the film. This series of images, which start out very small and local and end up with an aerial overview of the massive levee breach, make the point that the failure to evacuate has created a human disaster of unprecedented magnitude. Because visual evidence is just that—evidence—it works best when presented at the right moment, one in which the viewer is looking for real-world confirmation of a claim.

■ Figure 18.6 A boy holds a shingle that has just blown off the roof of his house. Trees start to swirl in the strong wind. These small details add up to powerful visual evidence for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina in this scene from Trouble the Water.

■ Chronology: How to Handle Time

One big decision in structuring a documentary is the question of time. Will you present the events in the order they unfolded in reality, or will you shuffle them around? And if you do rearrange the timeline, will your audience understand what you are doing and what is happening? A classic example of a straight chronological structure would be Robert Drew’s Primary (1960), which follows the campaigns of senators Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy as they vie for the Democratic nomination in the 1960 Presidential election. The two men are doing equally well in the polls, and the primary election is in a few weeks. This film takes a straight chronological approach, unfolding as the events do, without cutting back or forward in time. It ends with a Kennedy victory. This adherence to linear time works well for a story about an election with a tight timeframe and a clear winner, but it may not be the most compelling approach for every film. Trouble the Water, for example, starts two weeks after the Katrina catastrophe and develops its story through flashbacks to the days before and during the storm. This allows the filmmakers to show us the same characters and locations at two different points in time, which adds drama to the story. It also allows us to view the events of the storm with more information than we would have had at the time.

While you may have ideas about flashbacks or starting at the end and working your way back through time, you are typically better off starting your editing process by assembling the story in a linear way. Once you have a sense of your sequences, you can start to contemplate more complex approaches to the chronology.

Sometimes the idea of linear chronology is used, even if the events are not presented in the order they were shot. In Fred Wiseman’s film High School (1968), the documentary is structured around a school day. The film starts with a PA address from the principal, and a boy gets sent to the dean. A teacher walking the hall to monitor students looks into the gym and we move into an exercise sequence. Although the film was actually shot over the course of months, this “day in the life” formula highlights the sense of boredom, isolation, and arbitrariness that characterize a schedule-driven public institution.

Some films, of course, explore topics in a way that doesn’t depend on chronology at all. As discussed in Chapter 3, documentaries that are more rhetorical are structured more like a trial, with evidence and opinion presented as they are needed to develop and maintain the flow of ideas. An example would be Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In (2012), which looks at America’s 40-year War on Drugs through a series of interviews. Various interviewees detail the failures of US drug and criminal justice policy. The presentation of ideas has little to do with when things were filmed, or even when they occurred.

Alternatively, your main timeline may be built around your investigatory efforts as the film-maker Michael Moore’s work is typical in this regard. Roger and Me (1989) follows Moore’s journey to understand the closure of General Motors’ auto plant in Flint, Michigan, Moore’s hometown. Moore’s film raises another interesting point about chronology. While you are free to rearrange events for dramatic effect, it’s important that you not mislead your audience or oversimplify things. In his efforts to indict General Motors for Flint’s troubles, Moore added events into his film and through their placement made it seem like they happened after the plant closed when in fact they occurred before. There was a big debate at the time about whether his actions were justified. Just be forewarned that you need to be careful about implying causation through your handling of time.

Very often, documentary filmmakers will have more than one timeline or chronological trajectory in a film. In Marco Williams’ 2006 documentary, Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America (2006), about four US communities that violently forced African-American families to flee their homes in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, there are two main timelines that interweave. One is Marco’s own efforts, with the help of a local journalist, to uncover these long-hidden stories. The other is the devastating history of dispossession and racial violence that occurred from the 1880s through the 1920s.

■ Writing Narration

Narration can be an extremely useful tool in the kit of a documentary filmmaker. The kind of Voice of God narration, associated with the monolithic thinking of educational and propaganda films of another era, gave narration a bad name. In addition, filmmakers often want audiences to discover things for themselves, rather than be told what they are seeing. But narration can take many forms and, when skillfully used, it can add an important dimension to a documentary project. For some types of films, it is essential. Narration can quickly provide information and context that interviews and observational material may not offer on their own. It can also be more efficient than using complex editing maneuvers to make your interviewees say everything that needs to be said. Finally, narration can also set the tone of a film. Will it be humorous, hard-hitting, ironic, or contemplative?

When writing narration, do many rewrites to make sure it is clean, does not repeat itself, and avoids clichés. Editorializing, or emotional manipulation, should generally be avoided. If you are using narration, put it into your cut early in the editing process so you can to see how it works against the picture and other sound elements.

First-Person Narration

With first-person narration, the filmmaker speaks directly to the viewer from the “I” subject position. This very direct mode of address establishes the stakes that the filmmaker has in the unfolding story. It can also reveal the purpose behind the film’s creation, and even some of the process of making it. In this type of narration, the filmmaker becomes a character in his own film, though not necessarily an on-screen one. Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In (2012) situates the story in the personal experience of the filmmaker, who starts the film with the voice-over “My family came to America fleeing the Holocaust in Europe.” We see family photos, and hear Jarecki speaking in the first person. The narration doesn’t make this a film about Jarecki, but rather serves as a perspective funnel to bring the viewer into the film through the eyes of a filmmaker who is personally impacted and concerned about the situation documented in the film (Figure 18.7).

■ Figure 18.7 In The House I Live In, director Eugene Jarecki takes a critical look at America’s 40-year War on Drugs. While most of the film documents the criminal justice system at work, he starts the film with a personal narration that situates himself as someone growing up in a white family who sees black acquaintances pulled into an ongoing nightmare. Courtesy of Samuel Cullman.

Styles of Narration

Many films have a very straightforward journalistic approach to narration. But you should keep in mind that since the first sound films, documentary has offered a wide variety of approaches to narration. One of the early documentaries of John Grierson’s team at the British General Post Office (GPO), Night Mail (1936), is a tour de force (Figure 18.9). A simple factual narration that details the movement of the mail train on its route is interlaced with a poem W.H. Auden wrote specifically for the movie:

Thousands still sleep and dream and have nightmares.

They are asleep in Glasgow, asleep in Edinburgh.

They dream on, but they hope that when they awake they will have letters. Their hearts will pound when they hear the knock on the door of the postman, for “who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”

in practice

■ Narration as Counterpoint

While making In Whose Honor? (1997), about the use of Indian mascots at the University of Illinois, director Jay Rosenstein shot a typical Saturday crowd of sports fans fooling around and having a good time before a football game. The narration offers us a fresh and specific perspective on events, so that images that might otherwise go by unnoticed, like a logo on a sweatshirt or a handshake between two local businessmen, start to take on a new significance.

In Whose Honor? uses narration to establish a tone, a position, and a point of view on the issue of Native American mascots in sports. The main voice in the film is that of Charlene Teters, a Spokane Indian whose campaign is against Chief Illiniwek, the University of Illinois’ beloved mascot. Because of her experience and her identity, Teters has an authenticity that provides a moral backbone to the film.

The other main voice is that of a third-person narrator. That person offers us a sympathetic yet objective perspective that is closely tied to the visual evidence presented. Take, for example, this sequence near the film’s beginning.

Let’s look closely at some of the opening narration of the film. The first voice we hear in the film is that of Teters, who explains how difficult it is for her to see her people and their sacred traditions used for half-time foolery. Then we go to narration and accompanying visuals:

(Shots of a football parking lot crowd).

Narrator: It’s a Fall Saturday afternoon at the University of Illinois.

Guy roasting wieners: Great Day for Football!

Narrator: Fans come from all around to support the home team, the Fighting Illini.

Fan with beer in each hand: Go Illini!

Narrator: It’s a mix of business and pleasure . . .

Three guys in white shirts: Hi, Chuck, Ron. How are you?

Narrator: Politics and local celebrities. And everywhere is the symbol of the University of Illinois, a fictitious American Indian character named Chief Illiniwek.

Shots of mascot on cars, tee shirts, stores, a guy in an American Indian outfit dancing around with cheerleaders (Figure 18.8).

Narrator: Chief Illiniwek has been part of the University of Illinois for seventy years. Dancing at halftime in home football and basketball games, the Chief has become a crowd favorite.

■ Figure 18.8 In In Whose Honor? visuals work in conjunction with narration to create an effective illustration of the sports culture at the University of Illinois.

The narration explains how deeply embedded in local culture and tradition Chief Illiniwek is. And it does in conjunction with a skillfully edited montage sequence, in 50 seconds. While not completely neutral, the narration does not condemn or editorialize. It establishes the narrator as a trustworthy guide, capable of taking us as viewers on a journey to explore whether Teters’ point is valid or not. And this narration helps give the film’s dramatic engine a strong start.

Auden’s incantation invites viewers to a much more personal and subjective stance in relation to the idea of getting or sending a letter. It is imbuing the images of post office workers sorting and bagging the mail with our deepest hopes and fears. The poetry is read to a building tempo that works closely with the music of Benjamin Britten and the pace of the editing to create an effect that still has emotional punch some 80 years later.

Writing the Essay Film

One final form worth mentioning is the essay documentary. The essay film is typically organized around a poetic or personal voice-over. This form is freed from the constraints of chronology and the documentation of events in real time, and largely free from the need to educate the viewer using facts. The essay film takes up the project of “making visible theoretical ideas,” as film theorist Nora Alter writes.

One can jump throughout space and time . . . from the objective representation to the fantastic allegory to an acted out scene. One can represent dead or living, artificial or natural things. Using everything that exists and that allows to be invented—just as long as it can serve as an argument for the visualization of a basic idea.³

One of the great masters of this form is Chris Marker. His film The Last Bolshevik (1993) is structured as a series of letters to Russian film director Aleksandr Ivanovich Medvedkin (1900–1989) (Figure 18.10). The Last Bolshevik is a tribute from one filmmaker to another, an archeological expedition into film history that reveals new cinematic treasures, prompting us to reflect on the relation between art and politics in the former Soviet Union. The film uses archival film footage, observational material shot by Marker, and iconic images (including a sculpture of a horse rotating on a pedestal), all tied together by Marker’s poetic voice-over.

■ Figure 18.9 In this scene from Night Mail, the narrator recites poetry that is accompanied by the sound of the train coming up through the hills that separate England and Scotland.

■ Figure 18.10 The Last Bolshevik is structured as a series of letters from director Chris Marker to Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin.

The film starts with an interview with an elderly man speaking Russian, filmed in a medium close-up. Over it, we hear Marker’s voice-over:

Aleksandr Ivanovich Medvedkin is a Russian filmmaker born in 1900. Tired fathers carve notches on the furniture to measure their children’s growth. The century carves such notches on Medvedkin’s life. He was five, and then in rode What Has to Be Done. Seventeen, and he knew. Twenty, the Civil War. Thirty-six, the Moscow Trials. Forty-one, World War Two. Fifty-three, Stalin’s death. And when he himself dies in 1989, it is on the crest of Perestroika. In one of his last interviews, he berated me as usual. “You lazy bastard. Why don’t you ever write? Just a few lines, like this.”

Medvedkin holds up his hand with a small space between thumb and forefinger. The film freezes on the shot (Figure 18.10), and the narrator continues:

Dear Aleksandr Ivanovitch, now I can write to you. There were too many things to hush up then. Now, there are too many to say, and I will try to write them, even though you’re not here to listen any more. But I warn you, I’ll leave much more space than there is between your two fingers.

This starts a narration that carries viewers through the entire film with language that works against the typical realism of documentary, creating instead a rich field of metaphor and historical appreciation for a world where imagination is as important as fact.

■ Conclusion

While we think of filmmaking as a visual art with the camera as its main tool, after reading this chapter you should have a sense that writing is central to every documentary film project, and that it is much more than just putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys). We write to develop the flow of our film, to organize and rework our storytelling strategy, to convey information, and to give our documentary a point of view and a tone. While this may seem daunting, remember that every word you write or scene you cut will help you focus more clearly on what your film is about and how to communicate its heart (and hopefully your own) to an audience.