Is documentary editing the hardest form of editing? That’s what several of our Meet the Experts: TV Editors panelists believe.
“Starting out, I did some documentary cutting and it’s just so hard to not have a script to go back to,” “The Bear” editor Joanna Naugle tells Gold Derby at our panel alongside Lauren Beckett Jackson (“The Daily Show“), Adam Penn (“Genius: MLK/X“), Tim Murrell (“A Gentleman in Moscow“) and Alex Trudeau Viriato (“Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story”). “It’s so fun to have things be so open-ended, but also at the same time, I’m so lucky on ‘The Bear,’ we have amazing scripts to go back to. So kudos to the unscripted editors. It just takes so much more finessing and so much more big picture to be like, ‘OK, we’re building this house as we’re also cutting it,’ whereas I have the blueprint to start from. I definitely admire documentary editors a lot.”
Jackson notes that documentaries usually come with lots of archival footage for editors to sift through and determine what’s most impactful. Early in her career, Jackson worked on a documentary about the Greek Civil War that was entirely in Greek. “I don’t speak any Greek as you might have guessed,” she quips. “So I had to sit with the director every day and she’d go through some of the interviews with me and we’d go back and forth on what might work, what music might work here, what B roll we could use to enhance this story. But a lot of it was part of this huger, much more big archival project that had animations in it as well, there was narration. And so just trying to pull all those elements into a story you want to tell and getting the director’s vision right — it was something that was near and dear to her heart, so you don’t wanna butcher it. … Documentary is definitely I think the hardest form.”
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As the sole documentary editor on our panel, Viriato feels the opposite. It’s been so long since he’s edited a scripted project that it would be difficult for him to acclimate to. “As much as I appreciate the validation that documentary editing is hard, at least I’m doing it in English, not in Greek,” he notes. “I think I don’t know any other world now. For me, it’s the opposite. It’s been so long since I’ve cut anything scripted, going back and having someone tell me, ‘This is what happens in this scene’ and not having this open sandbox — as long as it’s been said in the world and as long as it exists in a clip, those are sentences and words that I have to access. I could just put that in. I thought about it the other day of going back to a script … I haven’t experienced that in years now that I’ve kind of been in documentaries and I kind of question what I would be like going back into that. I think it would kind of be scary to be told, ‘This is what needs to happen here.’ So I think it’s what you’re used to. I’d be more fearful to go back.”
Watch our full discussion to get their takes on trailer edits and more. Click each person’s name to watch an individual chat.
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