Listening / Dadirri

I'm editing a feature documentary right now, which is a long process full of moments of beauty and epiphany coupled with moments of wondering if this "process" and endeavor is completely bonkers.

I've just completed the first phase of editing - watching the footage. All (or almost all) 300 hours of it. It feels necessary to me (at least for projects like this one) to know the footage intimately. I've done it before, but this is the most footage I've watched down in this intensive of a time, and it had me wondering about the "process". I've been taking notes, actively formulating ideas, but at the end of weeks of watching there isn't much to literally show in terms of an edit. I've just watched...and listened.

Watching and listening have such different connotations in English. Obviously they relate to different senses - the two physical sensations communicated with a film. But to say "I watched someone" versus "I listened to someone" feels very different. Why don't I say that I listened to 300 hours of footage instead of watching 300 hours of footage?

I've always been confident that this stage of editing is incredibly valuable, but at the same time have been awkwardly apologetic for it. Then I recently read an article about words in other languages that do not exist in English. I love lists like this. One word in particular jumped out to me: dadirri, Australian Aboriginal, “a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening”.

Now I'm not trying to claim I understand the cultural subtleties of what this may mean, or appropriate the word, BUT I am grateful for words like this because – like magic – just naming something can create mental space for that concept to exist comfortably in one's mind. Almost immediately I felt more at ease with this "deep reflective listening" process because a whole civilization of people where insightful enough to have a word for it. It's not a bonkers process; it's profoundly respectful. If the footage is going to tell the story, I as editor first need to listen to what that footage is trying to tell.

Transformative reality

These words from the editor of the BBC’s Storyville really spoke to me in relation to the new doc I'm editing. As I watch through the footage and germs of story and structure are planted in my mind, I have to ask myself many of the questions proposed here.

"The best docs celebrate a sense of the accidental. And they matter. Like unknowable bits of the universe, they come into existence when a collision occurs. The collision needn’t be violent, and it can indeed be contrived. Nonetheless it has to happen, and something has to occur when it has happened. Good docs appear to wrest a degree of coherence from the contingent mess of life, but when we finally leave them we must be aware that the ordering was wholly provisional. That’s the only real way to make a documentary film – by setting out what you believe to be true, or beautiful, and destroying any certainty by implying that, yes, it could have been described in a near-myriad other ways. This comes down, I think, to having a strategy for life while being prepared to abandon it. What other way is there of staying alive?

I know this may sound like warmed-over existentialism, but this is the conclusion I’ve come to after sitting watching doc after doc, in an effort to write a non-academic, fan’s-notes book about the form. The docs I like are irremediably hybrid – a mixture of authorial personality, cod epistemology, appropriated or created history and whatever seems current and interesting. Sometimes they are polemical, sometimes tinged with fictional contrivance. The only rule is that they should have no rules. They should be, rather than tell. They should make the worst things comprehensible. No documentary should be without some aesthetic bliss, even if it is tamped down, minimal, barely noticeable. So yes, documentaries do matter, I think they really do."

Original article

Bricks, Walls, and the Art of Organization

Being well-organized is a virtue listed in almost every job posting seeking an editor, and with good reason – it's incredibly important. But beyond the need for basic file organization, the process of using bins within a project can sometimes move past a technical, administrative task to a useful creative tool.

I recently started editing a project that has to unpack a message with many parts to it, through many voices. Unlike a film that has distinct scenes, organizing here could go a few ways: by person, theme, etc, but in the end those weren't getting me any closer to putting together a cohesive argument, story or film. It reminded me of a talk I heard from Alan Berliner on editing. He said he names bins based on emotions, or abstract terms that will trigger emotions (I'm paraphrasing here) – basically words to conjure what experience and feeling one gets from the specific footage and wants to reinforce in the edit. And what's left is building blocks of a different fabric than just their literal content.

Maybe diverging from such strictly intellectual categorization of clips can give more insight into what the building blocks of any given film should be. Certainly the uniqueness of any project will call for a unique process – and I've come to find that when embarking on a new edit, it's exciting and fascinating to explore the question: "what are the building blocks for this edit going to be".

(I'm now reminded of one of Brian Eno's more oblique Oblique Strategies cards: Not building a wall; making a brick.)

Editing as Punctuation

I love a video essay on editing, and this one is fantastic in the way that it explores not only the power of editing to create thoughts, but how the language of editing can create whole modes of thinking. A cut is a break; a cut is a join; a cut is a blink; a cut is a new thought.

The Switch

After a decade of editing on Final Cut Pro, I'm right now downloading Premiere for my own system. It feels momentous – even though I've edited on Premiere plenty and will continue to use FCP on some projects for a time. And in many ways they are both the same animal of a timeline-based, non-linear editing platform. But it has me wondering: how much is one's craft affected by the details of these programs? How much would changing to a different line of paintbrush affect a painter? Does knowing more editing systems help an editor better see the craft beyond the tool?

Fair vs Balanced

I love hearing from other documentary filmmakers about their process and the way they see and experience story, and Marshall Curry's latest piece – where he dissects a dichotomy of sorts that he sets up as the difference between fair and balanced – particularly spoke to me. As much as this relates to the whole process of filmmaking, much of it really comes down to what happens in the editing. The themes of how much to include from disenting voices, what's fair to the audience, and what the duties of a filmmaker are to present "all sides" of an issue, are questions that come up a lot for many of us, myself included, and I found Marshall's well articulated thoughts on the subject to be clarifying and empowering.

Deviating from the script

I recently dusted off a hard drive to finally finish up an old side project. It's a fiction short, and after a few years of really focusing on documentary and non-fiction, it's been interesting to revisit it. What I've been struck by most looking over the rough cut, is how much I'm now planning to cut out – extraneous lines of dialogue, shots that I find too revealing (when imagination would be more powerful), and maybe even a whole scene or two. I always knew this is a normal part of editing fiction, but learning from the "writing" process that is so commonly done in the editing room for a doc is coming in very handy in identifying where to deviate from the original script.

Analog

I find it inspiring to get out pencil and paper sometimes. Maybe it's just the benefit of looking away from the screen, or maybe the tactile world stimulates something different in the mind, but it can really help with brainstorming.

After lots of permutations and rearrangements, this is the final storyboard for A Will for the Woods. The process really took off once we moved from digital to analog, so while it might look chaotic at first glance, to me it still feels like an elegant solution to a puzzle.

There is no b-roll.

I've been embracing the idea lately of resisting the use of the term b-roll. When working on an edit, I want each image to be perceived by the viewer in a way that moves their experience forward, and at the same time, I want to construct context and a unique experience for them. To do all that, I feel that I first must honor any footage I'm considering using by treating it as its own valid, unique, raw material, and abandon the concept of typical b-roll. Also, the term just makes me think about We Got That B-roll.

“Out of void” vs “out of chaos”

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” – Mary Shelley

Ever since I first saw this quote, it has rung very true to me, at least in my own experience with the art of editing – manipulating chaos into order and, in doing so, breathing life into something new.