Why We Like Editing Documentaries

Much has been going on in the world of Media, Entertainment and Technology (as Ken Rutkowski is fond of saying over at the World Tech Roundup). But I promised you last week that I’d forsake the land of grand prognostications and talk about the film that I’ve been working on — a documentary short called RIVERS which has been occupying a large amount of my time of late. Along the way, I hope to give you a glimpse of what it means when I say that it’s important to “think like an editor.”  Editing isn’t just putting images together, it’s weaving and shaping a story.

One of my favorite things about documentaries is that I learn an awful lot about subjects that I know very little about. One of my first jobs as an assistant editor was at an old unit of ABC-News called the “White Paper Unit.”  Under the guidance of master producer Marlene Sanders the unit put together a one-hour documentary every month.

I was assistant editing on a piece about strip mining, a level-headed but heartfelt doc about a social action subject that seems to have disappeared from the public consciousness. As an assistant editor, I got to be a fly-on-wall, listening to the field producer and the editor discuss all of the issues that come up in the creation of a documentary – story telling issues, political ramifications, ethical considerations, and much more. It was a great learning experience, and one reason why I believe in being an assistant editor, even to this day. And, along the way, I learned a lot about the subject matter as well.

I can’t say that this is something that happens all of the time on a narrative film.

[As an aside, one of the largest issues that I think students at many film schools have with their narrative films is making those film personal. By that, I mean that they have problems allowing themselves to go deep inside their darker souls in order to make filmmaking decisions. It is a problem that doesn’t exist as much with their docs – in those films, they seem to give themselves permission to dig deeper. This makes for more passionate, involving films for the audience.]

RIVERS is an odd little film in that it is actually constructed up material shot for five other films. Five separate film crews went out to film the stories of how various people live with five different rivers around the world – the Amazon, Danube, Ganges, Mississippi and Rio Grande. Each of those crews will be making their own films eventually, but they also sent all of their footage back to me in Los Angeles, and I am making what we call a “meta movie” which talks about the similarities and differences among people worldwide in how they live with their rivers.

For the techies in the crowd, let’s get the technical details out of the way first. The footage was shot using a Panasonic HVX200 HD camera, capturing in DVCPro HD (that is, the P2 tapeless workflow). I edited using Avid Media Composer 3.0 (this is the new version and I love it). We will be finishing up within the next several months for a premiere in Beijing in November.  It’s going to be a tough schedule to make in time, but it’s fun and I’m working with some great people.

There have been some real challenges in editing a film basically long-distance.  Getting footage from five different crews is an erratic affair and things which come naturally to me (like naming conventions, notes and transcripts) weren’t part of everyone’s workflow. But what has been especially exciting to me is shaping a story from all of the footage.

One of the first jobs I had was to figure out what we wanted the movie to say. Some discussion between myself and the producers led us to feel that the film wanted to be about how people relate to their rivers across the world and that, despite the differences in geography and culture, there were some striking similarities among all of them.

This led me to think that we needed to find ways in which the footage, though visually looking very different (the boats and people in India, for instance, look very different than the ones on the Mississippi), contained similar actions or feelings. I looked for shots of the rivers that had similar shape ripples, or boats moving in the same directions, or people who said or who were doing similar things. Everyone had varying shots of their rivers and there were some great similarities between them, even though the colors of the rivers varied widely.

Then we needed to determine a shape for the film. I came up with the idea to, after a short introductory section, divide the film up into five topics – Death, Life, Play, Ritual, and Work. I  then set out to look for sections in the dailies that reflected one or more of each of these areas.

When I started editing in earnest it quickly became apparent that the category of “Death” was not substantial enough to warrant its own section.  Though there was an entire sequence shot at Ganges of a cremation, it could also work well in the “Ritual” category. And, while the sequence that had been shot of the flood-ravaged Mississippi certainly could have been structured to indicate the idea of death, the interviews and the footage spoke more to how people lived with the threat of flood, and worked to avoid the repercussions of one.

So, the “Death” section went away.

Then came the realization that presenting every river in every section was going to become boringly predictable — very quickly. In addition, not every river’s crew had shot material suitable for every section – Ritual and Play being two of those subjects not universally covered.

And, finally, I felt myself shying away from literal interpretations of each and every category. Sure, the Ganges cremation fit perfectly into the “Ritual” area. But I also liked seeing two parallel groups of young twenty-somethings out at two clubs/restaurants that sat on the Danube  — that felt like a ritual as well.  So did a group of children from a summer camp who were rafting on the Rio Grande. The way in which they received instructions from their counselors, followed the lead rafter, handed back in their oars, etc. – these all felt like rituals in their own way. It made more sense in a movie like this to be more lyrical than literal.

So, slowly, the film came into shape.  It is now 30 minutes long (in its first cut) and much of the Amazon footage is still to be received and integrated (you see what I mean by “challenges”?).  I’ve sent the cut out to the producers and, when we meet in a week and a half, we’ll start in on a second cut. (In the meantime, I’m making changes to my cut, so it’s that much further along when we meet.)

It’s been fun.  I’ll let you know when it’s done and how and where you can see it.

Until then, remember that in order to “think like an editor” it’s important to be organized in your thinking.  But not so organized that it doesn’t allow for great changes in that thinking to take place.