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Documentary Editing
Principles & Practice
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Documentary Editing: Principles & Practice
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Book Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Construction of Meaning in Documentaries
Principles of Documentary Editing
Your Documentary Editing Panel
Part I: Setting the Stage for a Successful Edit
Chapter 1: Planning Your Schedule
Documentary Schedules: How Many Weeks?
Chapter 2: Organizing Your Footage
File Organization on Your Hard Drives
Bringing The Files Into Your NLE
A Clean Window on Your Footage: The Feng Shui of File Structure
Documents You Will Need
Chapter 3: Everyday Work Practices
Work in Stages
Focus
The Vital Importance of Taking Breaks
Duplicate and Archive: Leaving a Trail of Breadcrumbs Behind You
Scraps Sequences & Alternate Shots
The Director/Editor Relationship: Working Together and Working Alone
Part II: Finding Patterns
Chapter 4: Viewing and Digesting
Chapter 5: Making Select Reels
Creating Source-Based Select Reels
Creating Topic-Based Select Reels
Chapter 6: Refining Select Reels
Drawing Initial Conclusions About Your Narrative From Your Select Reels
A Fork in the Road
Part IIIa: Constructing and Refining Scenes
Chapter 7: Evidentiary Editing: Building Interview-Based Scenes
Constructing the Framework: Anchor with Audio
Finding "Hinge Clips"
Stitch Together the Seams with Cutaways
Smoothing Edits
Chapter 8: Verité Editing: Building Observational Scenes
Build Up or Trim Down: Two Options for Finding "The Good Bits"
Invisible or Self-Referential?
Microbeats: Sculpting Human Behavior Onscreen
Body Language
Verité Cutaways
Workarounds for Insufficient Cutaway Material
Making Amalgam Scenes
Integrating Audio from Unrelated Scenes
Mixing Evidentiary and Verité Editing with the "Pop-in" Moment
Chapter 9: Building Montages
Media Montages
Part IIIb: Building the Rough Cut
Chapter 10: Choosing and Framing Footage
A Hierarchy of Experience
A Hierarchy of Intervention
The Limits of Verité
Chapter 11: The Fundamentals of Narrative
Text and Subtext
Experimentation
Chapter 12: Working with Narrative
The First Scene
The Beginning
The Middle
Endings
Reshoots
Creating Meaning Through Association and Juxtaposition
Alternative Approaches to Narrative
Chapter 13: Working with Details
Music
Archival Material and Stock Shots
Reenactments
Graphics and Animations
Lower Thirds
Location Cards
Subtitles
Chapter 14: Working with Time
Marking Time
Rhythm
Pacing
Dynamics
Pauses
Transitions
Part IV: The Refining Process
Chapter 15: Feedback
Evaluating the Work and Taking Direction
Why Hold a Rough Cut Screening?
Tips for a Successful Rough Cut Screening
Interpreting Notes
Chapter 16: Fine Cut to Final Cut and Beyond
Clarity Is King
Trimming Scenes Down
Cutting Scenes To Remove Redundancy
Cutting Scenes To Improve Narrative or Emotional Logic
Removing Unnecessary Pauses & Utterances
Inspecting and Improving Cutaways
Moving Backwards: Overcutting and How to Avoid It
Picture Lock and Beyond
Part V: Seeing It All Come Together: Analyses of Four Films
Chapter 17:Analyses of Two Feature Documentaries
My Kid Could Paint That
An Inconvenient Truth
Chapter 18: Analyses of Two Short Documentaries
Skip
Hotel 22
Appendix
Appendix A: List of Films Cited
Appendix B: Case Studies of Schedules for Feature Documentaries
Appendix C: Documents You Will Need
Author(s)
Biography
Jacob Bricca, ACE is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona's School of Theatre, Film and Television, where he teaches classes on editing and documentary filmmaking. A member of the American Cinema Editors, he has edited over a dozen feature films, 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.
Featured Author Profiles
Jacob Bricca
Assistant Professor, University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film and Television
Tucson, AZ, USA
Reviews
"Anyone involved in the intellectually-challenging and labor-intensive work of documentary editing will find this book an essential companion. Whether you are a novice editor or an experienced hand, Bricca's unwavering faith in the process of editing will guide you securely down the bumpy road to the finished film."
—Julie Sloane, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
"Jacob Bricca’s Documentary Editing is a critical addition to the documentary filmmaker, editor, or professor’s collection. In fifteen years of filmmaking and teaching I have not come across such a straight-forward, cohesive, and useful manual for how to tackle that most daunting of challenges: editing the documentary film."
—Sally Rubin, Documentary Filmmaker, Editor; Professor, Chapman University
"The book finishes up with an analysis of four films, two feature length and two short. Along the way a multitude of other narrative documentaries are discussed and analyzed. Bricca's writing is clear and focused."
—Conrad J. Obregon
"Author, educator and film editor Jacob Bricca asks the question in the introduction to this how-to book on editing the documentary and then spends the next 240 pages providing a very satisfying answer. He clearly reminds us of the difference and relative ease of editing a narrative fiction film, in which ‘by and large, we already know the intention of every scene and the approximate purpose of every shot.’ Compare that to the twists and turns that often occur in the filming process of documentary, where the filmmaker may think they are making one film at the start, and by the end of filming, the meaning or purpose of the available footage is still debatable. It is a well-accepted truism that in documentary film practice ‘the story is created in the editing room.’
There is much to recommend in this book for teaching in film production classes, but as a writer I found that certain elements could be applied to my own editing in words, rather than pictures. Ultimately, Bricca unravels the complexity of editing, demystifying the art of storytelling in the process."
—Cynthia Close, Documentary Magazine, Fall 2018; "Reality Ink: The Zen of Editing: A Primer"
"Jacob has done a great service to aspiring documentary editors by demystifying the creative process. Ideas don’t come to an editor in a flash of inspiration. They come after hours of looking at footage, organizing clips and making connections. Jacob gives his students a process from which an insight or structure can emerge. He describes each step to show what should be happening in the little baby steps you make until the whole starts to form. The footage writes the script, and Jacob explains how to open the mind and heart to let it through."
—Bee Ottinger, CEO, SnapCuts and Former Head of National Avid User Group
Support Material
Companion Website
Please visit our companion website for additional support materials.