5

Internal Medicine

► Coverage

One of the delightful aspects about professional editing is how each morning or afternoon a package will appear on the doorstep of your editing room. Contained within it are toys for you to play with. It is probably as close as you can get to nursery school as an adult, and also be paid for it. Those toys are the previous day’s coverage.

Coverage is what an editor has to work with. As the name implies, coverage is achieved through the variety of angles that the director captures in order to cover all the necessary action and dialogue contained within a scene. From this range of possibilities the editor must select the best candidates to construct the film. In features, the coverage arrives each day of production in the form of dailies, or rushes, the collection of scenes and takes from the previous day’s shooting. Traditionally, lab cutoff is midnight, which means that the raw negative must be delivered to the film laboratory by midnight or else miss the opportunity for developing and printing or for digital transfer for the next day’s viewing. Where shooting a million feet of film used to be an extremely rare occurrence, today studio productions often consume from 500,000 to a million feet.

Though technology has made the editing process accessible to more and more students of the medium, it has introduced another aspect that rarely existed in the past. That is the issue of substandard coverage. Apprentices and assistants in the past were constantly exposed to professionally shot footage and, though they may have complained ceaselessly about every little gaff, they had the advantage of seeing footage that met professional standards. Today, though coverage is more plentiful than ever—probably more digital images are created in a day than were previously photographed in the course of a year during the celluloid era—the overall quality has diminished.

The contemporary student editor or independent film editor, some of whom may also wear the hat of writer, director, or cinematographer, often deals with limited coverage, takes that end too soon or don’t hold long enough on the subject, arbitrary compositions, poor lighting, and sparse setups. Confronted with this paltry coverage, the editor, at best, learns to rely on ingenuity to overcome deficiencies but, at worst, fails to develop an appreciation for well-shot material and the demands that it entails. When possible, some neophyte filmmakers hire experienced professionals to help bridge the gap in terms of obtaining well-shot coverage. Others, enamored of the auteur approach but forgetting that most auteurs had extensive experience on other filmmakers’ projects before taking the helm, prefer to perform most of the functions themselves with mixed results.

But what are these different angles that make up the coverage? A close-up seems fairly obvious, but what’s a master, or a cowboy, or a pickup? As with most pursuits, film has nomenclature for common objects and activities. Probably it has more than most, and some are quite colorful due to the creative nature of the business. Following is a brief review.

The Master Shot

The master shot generally contains all the dialogue and action in the scene. It can require sophisticated blocking in order to choreograph the actors’ and camera’s movements throughout the course of the entire scene. In that way it becomes the editor’s road map, along with the script. In subsequent coverage this long shot will be broken down into its constituent parts to supply multiple angles for the editor. In some cases the master shot becomes the sole coverage for a scene, such as in Birdman (2014) or the opening scene of La La Land (2016). Other master shots that play without a cut include the Halloween CarnEvil scene from the 2009 remake of Fame and the roving, 360-degree master from Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996). Early films, as far back as the 1930s, often relied on static master shots to tell the story. Today that approach is generally considered too stagey and runs counter to the needs of editors.

Many directors expend a lot of time and attention ensuring that they get a superb master shot. Some have limited experience in the editing room and rely on heavily choreographed masters to fulfill the function of a scene. Directors who have worked as editors know that even the best master shots may be chopped up and intermixed with other angles in order to achieve maximum effect.

The Establishing Shot

The establishing shot identifies a locale and places the viewer in the physical context of the scene. Too often this shot is left out of the coverage, resulting in a claustrophobic feeling, as well as making it difficult to perform a smooth transition from one scene to another. The establishing shot may be the exterior of a building, a panorama of a city or landscape, or an otherworldly locale.

The Wide Shot

The wide shot allows the viewer to place the objects and characters in the frame (Figure 5.1). It can vary between a medium wide shot, where actors are recognizable, to extreme wide shots that give a sense of place without identifying the actors within it. While master shots often contain wide shots, wide shots are not necessarily master shots. When composing a wide shot the director must attend to populating the frame with compelling, well-lit, and well-composed information. Darryl Zanuck’s concern with CinemaScope, his studio’s great technical achievement of 1953, was that it showed too much. This has been proven time and again when wide shots appear sparse.

The Medium Shot

The medium shot, sometimes known as a cowboy when it is framed loose enough to include the holster in westerns, supplies a valuable transition between the restrictive framing of the close-up and the expansive view of the wide shot (Figure 5.2). When coupled with a dolly move, the medium, cowboy, or medium wide shot works well to follow conversations while actors stroll, jog, or sprint toward the camera. Sometimes the camera tracks directly backward as the actors approach. In other setups the camera may favor one actor over the other, in a sense creating a moving over-the-shoulder shot.

The Close-Up

In some regards the close-up is the most important shot in a scene (Figure 5.3). Through it the audience is allowed entry into the character’s inner life through the corridors of expression, reaction, and nuance. Traditionally, it is also the shot for which actors save their best performances. When reviewing close-ups in the first day’s dailies, the director and editor should evaluate the lighting to ensure that the eyes, those windows to the soul, are lit well enough to evoke a character’s emotions. Unless designed for a particular effect, extreme close-ups tend to overpower a scene and, in the case of wide-angle lenses that distort the face, will add a strange or quirky dimension that may not be desirable.

The Over-the-Shoulder Shot

Though often used in dialogue scenes in a role similar to the close-up, the over-the-shoulder shot allows a tie-in of the two characters (Figure 5.4). By framing the on-camera character with the shoulder of the character to whom he’s speaking, the director helps reinforce the physical proximity of the actors within the frame. The over-the-shoulder is one of the main shots to which the 180-degree rule applies. By observing the convention of placing the camera over the shoulder of each actor on one side of an imaginary line, screen direction and eyelines are maintained.

The 2-Shot

As the name implies, the 2-shot displays two actors, usually seen in profile, facing each other and framed in a medium shot. This angle is useful in dialogue scenes where cutting to a wide shot would be too extreme. The shot’s size remains intimate while allowing some breathing room and depicting the physical relationship of one actor to another. Leaving the 2-shot in order to return to a close-up can sometimes appear awkward. One solution is the springboard. Character A speaks and then, as Character B begins her response, the editor springboards off of Character B’s dialogue into her close-up where the line culminates. In this way the transition from medium or wide 2-shot to a tighter shot is accomplished.

The Reverse Angle

Though the most interesting shots are usually those that play on the actor’s face, sometimes a complete reverse is called for. In this case the camera sits 180-degrees away from its original position, giving us an alternate view of the set and the characters in it. Reverse angles prove useful in action and dance scenes, where their presence adds reality, variety, and clarity to the scene.

The Insert Shot

Perhaps the most neglected of all coverage, the insert shot (Figure 5.5), can contain essential information without which the scene might not make sense or the audience might feel cheated. Because of this the insert stage was invented, a small set where significant props could be photographed for inclusion in the final cut. Objects of all kinds, from guns to syringes to handwritten letters, end up on the insert stage.

In the BBC production Victoria, young Prince Albert, enthralled with a gardenia his cousin Queen Victoria has given him, reaches into his boot to remove a knife. In a brash move, he slits his shirt and places the flower in the gash. In cases like this, the power of the insert shot—the knife yanked from the boot top and the slice through the shirt—add unparalleled dramatic effect.

A series of classic insert shots can be found in Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film, Dr. Strange‑ love, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), based on the serious novel Red Alert. The flight crew of a B-52 bomber armed with nuclear weapons sets parameters on their cockpit instruments, including a fictional device known as a CRM114 Discriminator. When the device is destroyed they are unable to receive the recall code that would have prevented them from bombing the Soviet Union. The stream of details seen in the insert shots adds to the tension and increases the impact of their lethal mission.

Such are the basic angles that make up the daily footage.

The digital delivery medium is constantly evolving based on improved engineering of digital memory. In the case of the film print, an assistant has the task of breaking the film down into scenes and takes, removing the unusable material that consisted of lab waste or long pauses before the slate (Figure 5.6). In all cases the useable material lives somewhere between the slate where the striped sticks clap together before the director calls, “Action,” and the flash frame that appears when the camera stops, its open shutter allowing light to burn out the frame following the director’s call for “Cut.”

With improvements in high-definition cameras and digital recording devices (see Figure 5.7), the need for processing the film negative and its overnight stay at the lab has receded into the past, except on some higher-budget productions.

► From Chaos to Order

Most importantly, whether the film was shot on 35 mm film or ultra high-definition video, whether it was printed onto film or transferred to a digital medium, the dailies arrive in the editing room in a disorganized form.

What does that mean? Didn’t the production crew take care to meticulously arrange each shot? Didn’t they keep records of each of those takes? Didn’t they make an effort to get all the coverage the editor would need in order to tell the story? Of course they did. But life on the set is different from life in the editing room. And the order in which events occur on set is different from the order that must be established in the editing room.

Finding Order

How does the editor establish the necessary order? First by keeping in mind that, beyond all else, he is there to tell a story. That is what it is all about. It cannot be overemphasized how important it becomes to organize the scenes and takes in story order, not shooting order, which is the way they arrive. Directors do not have the luxury of doing this. On the set they have other priorities, such as getting the best performances, placing the camera in the most effective position, and making their day (i.e. completing all shots scheduled for that day). In this regard, it becomes necessary to shoot the movie out of order—not just out of scene order, as the scenes appear in the script, but also out of shot order as the shots appear within a scene.

In lighting a set it might be easier to start with close-ups while everyone is fresh and while the time-consuming task of lighting the entire stage is under way. But close-up dialogue doesn’t necessarily begin a scene. The scene might need to begin with a wide shot, but the wide shot is scheduled for after lunch. So the shooting order becomes a matter of expediency and convenience and a hundred other factors, few of which pertain to story. Because of this, the shooting order inevitably varies from the story order. And this conflicts with the proper organization of the editing process.

An example of shooting order follows. The boxes represent circled takes. Circled takes are the takes that the director prefers. In the case of film, they are the takes that will be printed or transferred by the lab, saving the costs of materials and time. In the case of video transfer, all the takes are often included since the cost of selecting circled takes would overtake the cost of transfer time and stock.

• 23–1, 2, 3, 4
• 23A–1, 2, 3
• 23B–1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• 23C–1, 2
• 23D–1, 2, 3
• 23E–1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• 23F–1, 2, 3, 4

In this case the first number, 23, is the scene number as it appears in the shooting script. The letter—identified as Apple, Baker, Charlie, Denver, and so on—signifies each new setup or camera position. Scene 23A might be a close-up, while Scene 23B might be a medium shot. The last series of numbers to the right are the take numbers. Every time the director calls for action, he creates a new take. And so the shooting proceeds, in alphanumeric order. This information is transferred to the slate so the camera records the information that can later be viewed at the head of each take. This, at least, is how it occurs in an ideal world. Remember the list of trials and tribulations enumerated on the set? Sometimes in the rush to get a shot, the slate is forgotten or, if remembered before the take is over, placed at the end instead of at the beginning. In that case it is referred to as a tail slate, and the board is turned upside down to designate this.

On all studio shoots a script supervisor sits beside the camera. Even low-budget and indie films, realizing the significance of this role, often include the script supervisor in their budget. The script supervisor is one of the editor’s best friends. She or he is responsible for logging all the pertinent information that applies to each and every take. That includes the scene’s duration, the lens used, the circled takes, and a brief description of the action and any problems that are encountered. The script supervisor also creates a new document, known as the lined script (Figure 5.9).

Editors, thankfully, are not usually privy to the mishaps, complications, and logistics of the set. In this way, they are like children who blithely play with the toy dinosaur they received for a birthday, unaware that their parents had to work to get money to buy the toy, pay the mortgage for the house where the dinosaur and child will live, cook the meals, and so on. They take all of that for granted. Editors have to concentrate on one thing: telling the story in the best way possible. Again, what better method to organizing the dailies than in story order rather than shooting order!

Yet many editors miss this point and thereby introduce disorder into the process. When this happens, the end result suffers. It requires a certain amount of patience to carefully review each set of dailies and organize them into story order before starting to cut. By proceeding in this way, the editor and her assistant have begun the editing process at the moment they begin to organize the dailies. In both film and digital editing rooms, the assistant becomes an integral part of the storytelling process when he or she must think and carefully consider the order used to build the material.

Story Order

We have proceeded from the writer’s original screenplay to the shooting script that contains scene numbers and colored pages (signifying changes to the shooting script) and finally to the script supervisor’s lined script. This progression mirrors the translation process referred to earlier: from story to dailies to release print. Even for those whose shoestring budgets preclude the employment of a script supervisor, it remains important to understand the role of the lined script and how it functions. Following this approach will benefit every filmmaker, from those whose budgets surpass $250 million to those who managed to find a few thousand dollars to shoot a low-budget indie. Even if the editor does not have a lined script, he can decipher the order by carefully studying the footage and plotting out the shot arrangement. Generally, establishing shots and master shots are placed first, followed by medium shots, and then over-the-shoulders, close-ups, and finally inserts. In this case the order might look like this:

• 23B–4, 5
• 23A–2, 3
• 23–2
• 23E–1, 3, 6
• 23C–2
• 23D–3
• 23F–4

Notice that only the circled takes were printed, transferred, or included.

In constructing the scene bins or folders, the editor clicks and drags the clips around the bin until he has achieved a satisfactory order. This is reminiscent of a storyboard layout. Once the reordering is accomplished, all the takes will be available and in correct sequence each time the editor opens a bin. From this point they are ready to be loaded into the Source window and played back. Premiere Pro editors often stack folders labeled with scene numbers in the Project Panel and within these folders display the text version of each take. This saves space when working with only one computer monitor, but it restricts the editor’s view of the material. Most Avid editors and some Premiere Pro editors prefer to use two monitors and organize the shots as images. Since editing involves visual memory cues, it generally helps to look at pictures rather than text. Consider it a right brain verses left brain issue. Placing all the daily bins on the left computer monitor frees up room to work in the timeline area on the right computer monitor.

Some editors, particularly those who started out by cutting on film, such as Richard Chew (Star Wars and Risky Business), have told me they build their dailies as if on KEM rolls. In other words, they string the takes together into a continuous sequence that can be played back as one roll. Using the scroll bar on the Avid, the editor can rapidly scan forward or backward through the dailies and select what he needs. From this he may build a select roll, a sequence that contains only the favored shots.

Other editors, such as Richard Pearson, have their assistants organize the dailies into the scene bins. In the case of action scenes, he will build large select sequences in scripted, or perceived, story order. In dialogue scenes he sometimes strings together every take of a particular line reading. This allows him to compare in order to find the best performance. This has also proven to be a useful tool when working with directors who might have questions about which was the best reading.¹

Another useful tool is Avid’s ScriptSync. It produces a graphic representation of the lined script. By touching a particular text line, the editor can locate and play a corresponding take. This also allows immediate access to all takes that match a line of dialogue.

Some editors, including Pearson, like to have the script right in front of them and reread each scene before diving into it. They also feel it helps to read the script supervisor’s notes beforehand to see if anything unusual came up on the set. It also allows the editor to make a case for why he didn’t use a particular take, if it ever comes up.

Conrad Buff (Titanic, Training Day, King Arthur), on the other hand, minimizes the value of the script during the editing process. As he told me in our discussion, “I’ve read the script and have the story down, but so much is dependent on what the director gathers and what the actors do.”² Through their interpretations and the fact that some of the material usually gets rewritten, the script becomes less potent than the actual dailies that are in front of the editor. As a result there are new issues that he must recognize and somehow solve.

Reducing Bloat

Encountering the large volume of material that an editor is often faced with may seem daunting at times. Documentaries can accumulate hundreds of hours of digital media, and some feature films will shoot over a million feet of negative. Even when you are careful to watch all the dailies and make detailed notes, it is difficult to recall everything you have seen. What is the best way to keep track of all the best footage? The answer is selects.

When combing through thousands of feet or, as it often translates these days, hundreds of minutes of footage, editors can cull out the best material and string it together as a selects roll or sequence. Editors used to preview the copious footage with grease pencil poised to tick off the beginning and end of a shot. This would then be handed to the assistant, who would physically cut out the favored pieces and attach them one after the other to form a select roll. Today the selects can be built as the editor views the material, leaving out the interim step—and, unfortunately, the assistant.

► The Gap

Once the dailies are properly organized, the editor screens them, usually with the director. In previous times—not too long ago—the standard method involved projecting the celluloid dailies in a screening room on the studio lot or in a makeshift space on location. Some filmmakers still value this approach. On the film Inception (2010), director Christopher Nolan insisted on screening 35 mm dailies with his director of photography (DP), Wally Pfister, and editor, Lee Smith. This old-school approach complemented the latest digital technology to allow nonlinear editing alongside 35 mm screenings. This permits the best evaluation of the film image while taking advantage of nonlinear editing.

According to Bryant Frazer in Film & Video magazine, Inception

After cutting the telecined footage on the Avid, the editors conformed the cut back to a 35 mm workprint so it could be screened in the theater.

Discussing his approach to dailies, editor Conrad Buff points out that running dailies in the traditional manner (often using nontraditional technology, such as HD projection) allows him to “see all the ingredients available in a logical order, compare takes for visual and performance reasons, and also try to determine if something is missing that would be great to have.” After that, the editing process begins. Here, the editor’s approach to the material becomes crucial. Says Buff:

But what if, in putting the film together, the editor discovers gaps in the story, coverage, or character development? This is one of the crucial aspects of film doctoring. Curing this involves, as for any doctor, a careful examination of the patient.

Examinations

Along the road from script to dailies to final cut, new items enter, unnecessary ones leave, and questions are raised. What made sense on the printed page suddenly jumps out waving red flags in the editing room. Or what seemed sufficient, even miraculous, on the set, suddenly pales before the detached and questioning gaze of the editor. Editors are generally people who are good at asking questions. They are not satisfied with what lies before them. They take nothing for granted. What may have seemed obvious to the writer or director or producer makes no sense to the editor. In this regard, an editor who has a strong command of story as well as aesthetic and technical expertise will be well suited to diagnose and ultimately cure the problems of incomplete coverage.

The Puzzle

Remember the jigsaw puzzle referred to in Chapter 1? Students were asked to work collaboratively to build the puzzle. What they didn’t know was that a piece had been left out. Their job evolved from fitting the pieces together to using their imaginations and surmising exactly what that missing piece should look like. This is the editor’s job.

In the world of filmmaking, there are many options for filling that gap. Often the editor steals shots from other scenes. Or she moves around existing coverage within the scene. Sometimes she might order stock footage to create an important establishing shot or to fill out a montage. If there were lifts, she might retrieve the lifted footage and reincorporate it in an altered form. If the budget allows and the producer is willing, a time-consuming and expensive approach involves additional shooting. These pickups might be handled by a second unit crew, sometimes assigned to the editor’s supervision, or by the director. These may be as simple as an insert shot of a particular prop or action, or it might entail shooting a whole new scene. In each case the shots can be tailored to fit exactly what the editor and director feel is needed.

Saved in the Editing Room

It is important for the aspiring filmmaker to realize that these gaps occur in every film—to greater or lesser degrees—and not just on low-budget productions. One notable example is the Antoine Fuqua film King Arthur (2004). This film, with a budget of approximately $100 million, was shot on location in England, Ireland, and Wales. Much of the pivotal action takes place during a battle on a frozen lake (Figure 5.11). At one point in the skirmish, the surface cracks, large ice shards rise up, and the attacking army is swallowed by the frigid water. It is an ambitious scene and one that plays out magnificently on the big screen. But, according to the editor Conrad Buff, it wasn’t always that way.

The production “was troubled due to a lack of time and some politics between studio and director.” The entire scene, a major setpiece, was assigned to two days of production. In Buff’s opinion it would have required at least seven to ten days to shoot properly. The first day was consumed with mainly panoramic shots of the approaching armies, filmed from a mountaintop. After that, there was only one day left to capture all the needed coverage, including vital close-ups. By the time the second day wrapped, there wasn’t enough coverage to fully tell the story. “The initial dailies I received were essentially all master shots with some coverage of principal actors,” says Buff. But a scene of this magnitude required more comprehensive coverage than was supplied. “It was a battle, and it needed much more detailed and specific shots of archers firing arrows, men dying, ice breaking… . It was pretty much impossible to tell the story with the material [I’d been given].”

Back in the editing room, Buff reviewed the dailies and pieced together a preliminary cut that included place-holders for the missing pieces of the puzzle.

► Shot List

Surprisingly, many directors do not shoot to edit. They shoot to create interesting shots, to give the actors something to do, or to accumulate footage. But a director’s shot list is the beginning of the editing process. As David Mamet noted in his book On Directing Film, “The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.”⁶

There are probably as many directors who have no idea how the material they shot is going to fit together as there are directors who feel they can sit down and edit it themselves. At opposite ends of the spectrum, both do themselves a disservice. A director’s job is to generate footage based on the characters’ objectives. A director is not required to put the film together. He or she is responsible for creating the raw material for the cut. One of cinema’s greatest directors, Stanley Kubrick, offered the notion that “everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.”⁷ Of course, talented directors accomplish this in their own unique ways. In conjunction with their production designer and cinematographer, they fashion a compelling look or style. But the essential energy and pulse of the film remain in the editor’s hands.

As the early Russian filmmakers discovered, it is not an image on its own that is responsible for creating meaning but the collision of images. Like atomic particles smashing into one another, they liberate a new element, which carries the meaning of the scene. Over a century ago, Russian director Vsevolod Pudovkin revealed how each shot exists in a sequence to communicate one piece of information. Just one. Sequences are built “brick by brick” according to Pudovkin.⁸ This is an essential point. Yet it is not as obvious as it seems. All filmmakers forget this from time to time, and some never learn it.

Sergei Eisenstein’s revelation, based on an understanding of Japanese calligraphy, where the combination of characters creates the meaning, added to Pudovkin’s concept and fueled his theories of montage. The pictograph for crying, Eisenstein realized, was made up of two images: one for eye and one for water. Rather than merely placing them together, the combination spawned a completely new idea: that of crying. This marrying of previously unrelated images to generate a new meaning is what editing is all about. It is as true today as it was at the beginning of the art, even as the length of a particular shot has changed and the pace generally increased over the decades.

In this sense, the director needs to consider each shot as having something unique to say, but communicating only one point at a time to forward the story and character. In production classes, students are asked to create a complete shot list before their projects are greenlit. Most start out by imagining cool camera moves but neglecting the importance of a shot’s meaning. Instead they are asked to create a list of neutral or, as Mamet advises, uninflected shots based on their characters’ objectives.

Take something as simple as a guy who wants to get the attention of a girl in his class without the teacher noticing. Rather than asking each shot to fulfill multiple functions, we follow, as Pudovkin advises, a design for one—and only one—action. Here’s a possible shot list:

1. Wide shot (WS) teacher writing on the board
2. Close-up (CU) girl looking forward
3. Close-up (CU) boy staring in girl’s direction
4. Close-up (CU) girl turns toward boy
5. Close-up (CU) boy smiles
6. Close-up (CU) girl smiles
7. Medium shot (MS) teacher turns away from board, facing class
8. Medium close-up (MCU) boy looks down
9. INSERT boy’s hand writes on paper
10. Wide shot (WS) teacher turns back
11. Medium close-up (MCU) girl looks toward boy
12. Medium shot (MS) boy folds note into paper airplane
13. Over-the-shoulder (OV/SH) boy aims plane at girl
14. Medium shot (MS) teacher continues writing on board
15. Medium close-up (MCU) boy throws paper plane
16. Close-up (CU) plane lands on desk
17. Medium shot (MS) large, muscular student looks at the plane resting on his desk
18. Close-up (CU) boy staring
19. Medium close-up (MCU) muscular student opens the note
20. Close-up (CU) boy
21. Close-up (CU) girl watching
22. Medium close-up (MCU) muscular student reads the note
23. Close-up (CU) boy
24. Close-up (CU) muscular student looks up, throws a kiss
25. Close-up (CU) boy puts his face in his hands

Through this series of shots the story becomes clear. Yet the shots, taken singly, explain nothing. Only when placed next to the other shots do they take on meaning and forward a story.

Once the shot list is formed based on the characters’ objectives, it is possible to consolidate all the similar shots into a master shot list. It would look like this:

• WS teacher
• MS teacher
• MCU girl
• CU girl
• MS boy
• MCU boy
• CU boy
• OV/SH of boy on girl
• MS muscular student
• MCU muscular student
• CU muscular student
• INSERT boy’s hand writes on paper
• INSERT plane lands on desk

As you can see, only about half the number of angles would be required. All the shots from the original shot list are subsets of these shots. These would become the dailies. From these shots the editor will find all the individual components he needs to build the whole scene.

Whether organizing shots into bins or folders, the important issue is to make sure you do it in a consistent and orderly fashion. How is this achieved? First and foremost, consider the work you have set out to do—you are there to tell a story. Organize it as such.

► Notes