In my last post, I talked a lot about the difference between process and processing as it relates to editing. This week, I would like to circle back to that, but now with a focus on process and what editing is.
One of the earliest things I remember learning as a film major was about Sergei Eisenstein and the development of Soviet montage theory. Montage refers to the process of film editing in which a series of shots are edited into a sequence. Montage theory goes on to develop the idea that connecting a series of images has the power to convey different thematic and emotional messages about what an audience is seeing on screen depending on how the editor chooses to sequence them. The common example is that if you cut from an actors face to an image of a bowl of soup, the audience will perceive hunger as the emotion the sequence is trying convey. Which differs from if you cut from an actors face to an image of a woman lying down in a nightgown, conveying a different emotion or concept, such as lust.
What I find so fascinating about editing is just how underappreciated it is, yet how integral it is to how people understand the “language” of movies. Taking a film class was the first time that I really thought about the fact that movies are sculpted in every sense of the word: from how they are created on paper through screenwriting, to the choices made by the director and cast, to how a cinematographer decides to shoot a certain scene, to the decisions made by an editor when piecing everything together to form a movie.
Editing a documentary web series has challenged my own understanding and appreciation for editors because of how the process of building the story really comes from fragments of unscripted material. For HOUSE this is fun (and a bit daunting, if you couldn’t tell from my previous post) because there is a lot to work with. There are different ways to tell the story I want to tell from the footage I have in part because there IS so much footage to begin with. It’s exciting to come across a certain moment in an interview and think “this would be GREAT coupled alongside this other interview!” It’s similar to the feeling of putting together a large puzzle and the exhilaration of when you start to figure out which pieces go where. You have the side pieces and the corner pieces together (or in my case, interviews that you know can be used to frame the larger story you want the final product to convey) and then from there, it’s a long series of trying to push pieces into certain spots and figuring out what does and does not work.
Transcribing my interviews was akin to flipping all the pieces over to the correct side. It’s still a mess to look at, but at least you sort of have a sense of knowing what you are looking at.
Examples from my transcript and transcript "code" of how I categorized parts of interviews
The next part for me was figuring out how to organize the pieces into categories to make the “pushing pieces into certain spots and figuring out what does and does not work part” a little bit easier. I broke my footage into separate sequences in Premiere categorized by what “type” of footage it was and what type of content was within the footage. For the Chicago episode, were people talking about their memories of growing up and listening to house music? Or were they describing the feeling of house music in a certain part of the interview, but not in others? Was one clip particularly rich in footage that could be used as b-roll? Or sometimes, was the footage even usable at all?
The process of documentary filmmaking for me has been so much about asking questions and seeing how people respond to them. And the editing portion of the project has been no different. Another great advantage I have found in transcribing all of my interviews has been that it has allowed me to see what questions I can group together while editing different interviews together. I’ve done more work as a videographer prior to really trying to stick my hands in documentary and narrative filmmaking, which has benefited me as an editor in the sense that one thing I tried to keep in mind while Giovanna and I shot footage was how to incorporate a doctrine of “shoot for the edit” in the midst of shooting for the answers to questions I was asking of interviewees.
Shooting for the edit more or less means keeping in mind that at the end of the day, no matter how great something looks, you still have to give your editor material to work with that can allow your footage to connect seamlessly. In short, it means getting a lot of coverage on everything. It’s one thing to have a shot of someone on the phone and a shot of them hanging up after their conversation ends. It’s another thing to have a shot of a phone sitting on a table, getting the sound of the phone ringing, in addition to having shots of the person on the phone and the person hanging up. It gives you more room to work with in terms of transitioning from one shot with no phone at all to another shot entirely about a conversation on a phone, and it makes a world of a difference to edit.
HOUSE, as I’ve stated before, has been a great learning experience. Are there moments where I wish I had more coverage of an object or of a person? Most definitely. But there are also moments in watching the footage where I can see my own growth; in the way I ask questions, the type of questions I ask, and in the understanding between Giovanna and me about what we needed to capture. The later material is more manageable than the earlier material. It is rewarding to see my own development from the first day of the shoot to the last.
Last semester I thought I could just jump in with editing by simply looking through my footage and working from there. This semester has been a lot about organizing and making my footage “readable” for myself as an editor. In addition to understanding how editing works for documentary versus how it works for narrative. I’m still moving along, but I think the difference is that now, I have a sense of where I want to go, in part because I’m getting better at understanding how to piece my footage together and because I have worked at figuring out how to read my own handwriting, or in the case of HOUSE, reading my own footage and piecing together the questions I asked in interviews to formulate answers about house music and the house music community.
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