Documentary editing : principles and practice

262 Pages·2018·18.741 MB·English

by  Jacob Bricca

Documentary Editing
Documentary Editing offers clear and detailed strategies for tackling every stage of the
documentary editing process, from organizing raw footage and building select reels
to fine cutting and final export. Written by a Sundance award-winning documentary
editor with a dozen features to his credit and containing examples from over 100 films,
this book presents a step-by-step guide for how to turn seemingly shapeless footage
into focused scenes, and how to craft a structure for a documentary of any length. The
book contains insights and examples from seven of America’s top documentary editors,
including Geoffrey Richman (The Cove, Sicko), Kate Amend (The Keepers, Into the Arms
of Strangers), and Mary Lampson (Harlan County U.S.A.), and a companion website
contains easy-to-follow video tutorials.
Written for both practitioners and enthusiasts, Documentary Editing offers unique
and invaluable insights into the documentary editing process.
Jacob Bricca is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Theatre,
Film and Television, where he teaches classes on editing and documentary filmmak­
ing. He has edited over a dozen feature documentaries, including the international
theatrical hit Lost in La Mancha, the New Yorker Films theatrical release Con Artist,
the Independent Lens Audience Award winner Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew, and the
Sundance Special Jury Prize winner The Bad Kids. His directing credits include Pure,
which screened at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, and Finding Tatanka,
which premiered at the 2014 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

Documentary Editing

Principles and Practice
Jacob Bricca
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Jacob Bricca
The right of Jacob Bricca to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bricca, Jacob author.

Title: Documentary editing : principles and practice / Jacob Bricca.

Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical

references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034743 (print) | LCCN 2017047061 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781315560472 (E-book) | ISBN 9781138675728 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138675735 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Editing. | Documentary
films—Production and direction.
Classification: LCC TR899 (ebook) | LCC TR899 .B694 2018 (print) |
DDC 777/.55—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034743
ISBN: 978-1-138-67572-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-67573-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-56047-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Warnock Pro
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Visit the companion website: www.routledge.com/cw/bricca
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Construction of Meaning in Documentaries xi

Principles of Documentary Editing xiv

Your Documentary Editing Panel xv

PART I Setting the Stage for a Successful Edit 1

1 Planning Your Schedule 3

Documentary Schedules: How Many Weeks? 3

2 Organizing Your Footage 7

Organizing the Files on the Hard Drive 7

Bringing the Files into the NLE 10

Run a Test 12

Backing Up 12

Organizing Footage 13

Organizing Archival Material 15

Alternate “Binning” Strategies 16

Documents You Will Need 18

3 Everyday Work Practices 21

Work in Stages 21

Focus 22

The Vital Importance of Taking Breaks 23

Duplicate and Archive: Leaving a Trail of Breadcrumbs Behind You 24

Scraps Sequences and Alternate Shots 25

The Director–Editor Relationship: Working Together and Working

Alone 26

v
vi Contents
PART II Finding Patterns 31

4 Viewing and Digesting 33

5 Making Select Reels 35

Creating Source-Based Select Reels 36

Creating Topic-Based Select Reels 38

6 Refining Select Reels 43

Drawing Initial Conclusions About Your Narrative from Your Select

Reels 45

A Fork in the Road 46

PART IIIA Constructing and Refining Scenes 49

7 Evidentiary Editing: Building Interview-Based Scenes 53

Constructing the Framework: Anchor with Audio 53

Finding “Hinge Clips” 58

Stitch Together the Seams with Cutaways 59

Smoothing Edits 60

8 Verité Editing: Building Observational Scenes 65

Build Up or Trim Down: Two Options for Finding “The Good Bits” 65

Invisible or Self-Referential? 66

Microbeats: Sculpting Human Behavior Onscreen 68

Body Language 72

Verité Cutaways 73

Workarounds for Insufficient Cutaway Material 74

Making Amalgam Scenes 77

Integrating Audio from Unrelated Scenes 78

Mixing Evidentiary and Verité Editing with the “Pop-in” Moment 80

9 Building Montages 85

Media Montages 88
Contents vii
PART IIIB Building the Rough Cut 93
10 Choosing and Framing Footage 97

A Hierarchy of Experience 97

A Hierarchy of Intervention 99

The Limits of Verité 99

11 The Fundamentals of Narrative 103

Characters 103

Conflict 103

Progression 104

Other Ways of Constructing Progression 105

Text and Subtext 107

Experimentation 108

12 Working with Narrative 111

The First Scene 111

The Beginning 113

The Middle 117

Endings 127

Reshoots 129

Creating Meaning Through Association and Juxtaposition 131

Alternative Approaches to Narrative 135

13 Working with Details 141

Music 141

Archival Material and Stock Shots 145

Reenactments 148

Graphics and Animations 152

Lower Thirds 157

Location Cards 160

Subtitles 162

14 Working with Time 167

Marking Time 167

Rhythm 171

Pacing 172
viii Contents
Dynamics 173

Pauses 174

Transitions 176

PART IV The Refining Process 181

15 Feedback and Revision 183

Evaluating the Work and Taking Direction 183

Why Hold a Rough Cut Screening? 185

Tips for a Successful Rough Cut Screening 185

Interpreting Notes 186

Clarity Is King 189

Trimming Scenes Down 189

Cutting Scenes to Remove Redundancy 190

Cutting Scenes to Improve Narrative or Emotional Logic 191

16 Fine Cut to Final Cut and Beyond 193

Removing Unnecessary Pauses and Utterances 193

Inspecting and Improving Cutaways 194

Moving Backwards: Overcutting and How to Avoid It 194

Picture Lock and Beyond 195

PART V Seeing It All Come Together: Analyses of Four Films 197

17 Analyses of Two Feature Documentaries 199

My Kid Could Paint That (2007) 199

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) 204

18 Analyses of Two Short Documentaries 215

Skip (2011) 215

Hotel 22 (2014) 221

Appendix A: List of Films Cited 225

Appendix B: Case Studies of Schedules for Feature Documentaries 231

Appendix C: Documents You Will Need 235

Index 241
Acknowledgments
Writing this book has let me reflect upon what I have learned from my many teachers
over the years. At the tender age of 16, I was introduced to the film Koyaanisqatsi in
a sweltering hot Chicago classroom at a Northwestern University summer program.
I would like to thank the graduate student who chose to put it on the VCR—I don’t
remember your name, but if you’re out there you can know that it changed my life.
I knew little about documentary filmmaking until I took Jonathan Mednick’s “Doc­
umentary Realism” class as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University. Jonathan was
an inspiring teacher whose passion for the form made a huge impression on me. Rob
Rosenthal and Alex Dupuy in the Sociology department and Dick Ohmann in English
were also big influences; they made me look at the world in an entirely new way.
I had several influential teachers in the editing program at the American Film Institute.
Farrel Jane Levy, ACE, brought enormous patience and intelligence to our rough cut
critique sessions; Howard Smith, ACE, brought curiosity and humor; Brian Chambers
had a low-key steadiness that all editors need a little bit of; and Steve Cohen, ACE,
brought intensity and insight (“editing is 70% psychology,” he used to say fervently).
I also learned a great deal about documentary editing from Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe,
whose trust in hiring me to cut Lost in La Mancha I am still grateful for today.
In putting together this book, the patience, guidance, and support of my editor Simon
Jacobs has been invaluable. Craig Huston, Fiona Otway, Michael Kowalski, Sally Rubin,
and Julie Sloane all gave valuable comments that helped shape the manuscript in
important ways. My longtime collaborator Jonathan Crosby gave me fantastic film sug­
gestions, and Bill Macomber at Fancy Film provided key advice about post color and
sound processes. The contributions of my University of Arizona interns Sarah Lan­
caster and Leslie Bosch were significant and highly appreciated, as was the extra help
from students Tanya Nuñez, Adam Ciampaglio, and David Sternau. My University of
Arizona colleagues Yuri Makino, Michael Mulcahy, Beverly Seckinger, Lisanne Sky­
ler, Anna Cooper, Joshua Gleich, Brad Schauer, Barbara Selznick, Vicky Westover and
Bruce Brockman are an inspiration to me on a daily basis. And I would like to thank
Cecily Crebbs at Story Land, where many long hours were spent writing this book;
thank you for creating such a serene place for writers in Tucson.
I would like to dedicate this book to my father, who made sure that I was surrounded by
music as a child, and my mother, who gamely played along with my fantasies of being
a DJ by making requests for songs on my “radio station” (i.e., a single record player in
ix