The more interviews, the more events, the more elements you must orchestrate in your movie, the more you’ll need a paper planning method to stay on top of your material’s potential. What follows is a method for carving up transcript copies and narrowing your choices into a workable shape with a minimum of wasted effort. Figure 31-1 is a flow chart to illustrate this. The paper edit method allows you to get selected working materials up on the screen, after which you put documentation aside and work wholly with screen materials.
There’s no reason why you can’t take the principles that follow and apply them to a database system in which you cut and paste with a computer rather than literally cutting paper. For myself, I like the tactility of looking at hard copy and sliding slips of paper around.
To insert line numbers in Microsoft ® Word, go to File menu, click Page Setup, click the Layout tab. In the Apply to box, click Whole Document. Click Line Numbers. Select the Add line numbering check box, and then select the options you want. One allows you to start a second take, say, with a consecutive number. To see the numbers on your screen, select Print Layout in the View menu.
Whatever system you devise to manage information, stick with it and only make changes and improvements when you are ready to start a completely new project.
Until you replay the selected section you won’t know whether you can execute your in and out points as marked. Maybe you can’t lose all those verbal warm-ups before the in point; maybe your out point leaves Ted on a rising voice inflection so his statement sounds strange and unfinished.
Section IDs will always allow you to quickly locate the section in the Marked Up Transcripts volume and find it in its parent take. Without some such method, finding where material originated in order to extend it can waste inordinate time during a heavily edited show. You can also of course use a computer search function on the transcript files or search via timecode in the edited version, but searches always take time and effort.
Figure 31-2 has one more notable feature: the handwritten tag description of the section’s use, “Ted’s descript. of Farmer Wills.” When you face dozens of slips of paper, tag descriptions allow you to initially sort and structure them.
Now you are ready to construct a paper edit—really, a detailed sketch for the first assembly. The selected sections (Frame 6) will eventually be stapled to sheets of paper (Frame 7) as sequences, and the sequences will be assembled into a binder (Frame 8) holding the paper edit or plan for the first assembly of your movie.
This procedure may seem laborious, but if you are working on an oral history film, say, with a vast bank of spoken material, time spent organizing at the outset (indexes, graphics, guides, color coding, and so on) is effort generously rewarded later. I learned this when hired to edit the final game in the 1966 soccer World Cup documentary, Goal. There were 70,000 feet of mostly silent 35 mm film (that’s nearly 13 hours) shot from 17 camera positions. The only orientation was a shot of a clock at the beginning of each 1000-foot roll. My assistant Robert Giles and I spent a week up to our armpits in film, making a diagram of the stadium and coding each major event as it appeared in all the various angles. The game had gone into overtime due to a foul, and it was my luck to eventually establish that, during this most decisive moment, not one of the 17 cameras was rolling! Then, using sports reports and Robert’s far superior grasp of the game, we set about using an assortment of close shots to manufacture a facsimile of the missing foul. No one ever guessed we’d had to fake it.
The project was an editor’s nightmare. Had we not first taken the time to invent a decent retrieval system, the men in white coats would have carted us off in the legendary rubber bus.
To avoid your film turning into solid speech, first deal with your action sequences:
For a first assembly, follow the chronology of events. Later you may see more compelling ways to organize the story through time.
1/Jane/1 Graduation speech
1/Jane/2 Dinner with boyfriend’s family
1/Jane/3 Conversation with English teacher
2/Jane/1 Conversation with Dad
You have the many pieces of action made into a preliminary assembly, ready to accommodate the dialogue sections of the film. It’s best to represent these as sequences rather than as individual shots, which would be too detailed and cumbersome. Three sequences would go on separate slips of paper, each with a media location (cassette or P2 card number, minutes, and seconds):
1/05:30 Exterior school, cars arriving
2/09:11 Preparations at podium, Jane rehearsing alone
4/17:38 Airport, Jane looking for bus
Kneeling on the floor, move the slips of paper around to try different orders and juxtapositions. Certain pieces of interview or conversational exchange belong with certain pieces of action, either because the location is the same or because one comments on the other. This comment may be literally a spoken comment or, better, implied through ironic juxtaposition (of action or speech) that makes its own point in the viewer’s mind.
An example would be a scene in which our student Jane faces having to make a graduation speech before the whole school, a prospect that scares her. To make a literal comment, one would simply intercut the scene with the interview shot later in which she confesses how nervous she feels. A nonliteral comment might take the same rehearsal and intercut her mother saying how calm and confident she usually is. A visual comment during the rehearsal might show that she is flustered when the microphone is the wrong height and that her hands shake when she turns the pages of her speech.
Conflicting information is always stimulating because it shows contrasting points of view and challenges us to take our own position.
What’s the difference? The literal comment is show and tell because it merely illustrates what Jane’s thoughts and feelings already give us. The nonliteral comment is more interesting because it supplies us with conflicting information. Her mother rather enviously thinks her daughter can handle anything, but we notice signs that the girl is under a lot of strain. Either the mother is overrating the girl’s confidence or she is out of touch with her child’s inner life. This privileged insight, discreetly shared with the audience, gives us behavioral evidence that all is not well, that the girl is suffering, and alerts us to scrutinize the family dynamics more carefully.
The order and juxtaposition of material, we can say, have potent consequences. The way you eventually present and use the material signals your ideas about the people and the subject you are profiling and reveals how you intend to relate to your audience. In essence, you are like a lawyer juxtaposing mismatching pieces of evidence in order to stimulate the interest and involvement of the jury, your audience. Good evidentiary juxtaposition provides sharp impressions and removes the need to explain.
Don’t waste much time trying to refine the paper edit. Only by working through the nuances of the material onscreen and seeing how it plays can you be sure what really works.
The mobility and flexibility of the paper edit system reveals initial possibilities and gets you thinking. You’ve moved your slips of paper around on a table or floor like the raw materials for a mosaic. Each juxtaposition gives you ideas and sets you thinking, just as you might from looking at the potent relationships between chess pieces laid out on a board.
Don’t worry if your paper edit is vastly too long and repetitious. This is normal; you can only make refined decisions from experimentally intercutting and screening the material. Once you’ve decided a reasonably logical order for the chosen materials, staple the slips of paper to whole, consecutively numbered sheets and place them in your paper edit binder.
Now that you have a rudimentary story, you can rule lines between sequences and group the sequences into scenes and acts. From this master plan you can begin making a loose, exploratory assembly in your editing computer.