How to Edit a Documentary Film

[Music] so you've gone out and shot your documentary you collected all this beautiful footage interviewed all these wonderful people and you get back to your editing Suite open your first editing timeline and now what how do you take all of this mess of footage and turn it into a documentary today I'm talking about a technique that I've used in the past to help me craft my documentaries called text editing what is a text edit why you should consider using text text edits for your film and how to get started with some of the tools to

create a text edit my name is Mark Johansson I'm a documentary director and editor based in Canada I've been making documentary films professionally for 5 years now and on this channel I like to break down the nuts and bolts of how to create documentary films so if that's something that you're interested in I'd love for you to stick around and hit that subscribe and let's dig into text editing so what is a text text edit a text edit is actually exactly as it sounds it's where you take all of your dialogue your interviews that you

collected during your production you transcode those into text and then you use quotes from those transcribed interviews to create a loose edit of your film it helps to think of a text edit as a storyboard but it's a very detailed storyboard you know you might have created a storyboard in pre-production where you just Loosely laid out the Beats of the story that you thought you were going to shoot but a text edit is different because now we have all of the quotes from all of our characters and our interviews and we have all of the

building blocks of what we actually shot and now we just need to shape it into a loose story to help illustrate all the points I'm talking about in this video I'm going to show you behind the scenes of the text edit that I created for my film Mountain Turks before I dive into any of the specifics of my Mountain Turks text edit I just want to explain why you might consider creating a text edit for your film the biggest advantage of creating a text edit is just its Simplicity and Clarity you don't have all of

the overwhelming footage to go through uh organization to go through of that footage pulling selects you're not dealing with your program crashing you're not thinking about things like music or anything yet it's just your story structure in its purest form when you start crafting your text edit you are forced to go through all of your interviews that you've transcribed and start picking out themes and different ideas and in this process you just get a really good grasp of all of the interview footage that you shot and all of the dialogue that you have at your

disposal to tell your story it's a great way to not spend too much time in the edit before you have an idea of whether or not you have all the pieces you need to fully tell your story odds are if you can't make an interesting story in a text edit that has emotional highs and lows that has a story arc that has character vulnerability all the things that we love about a good story then you probably won't be able to make a powerful film no matter what visuals or cinematography you put on top of this

story arc this Simplicity of a text edit also gives you a different type of focus it allows you to see what's necessary for telling your story and what's just fluff you know you may have had a scene that you thought was going to be cool visually but then when you lay it out in your text edit you realize it's not really adding much to your story and it's just making your film longer you might as well chop it out keep it concise keep it entertaining keep the story moving along text editing is also a wonderful

tool for developing New Perspectives on your story because you're always pouring over all of the interviews reading through them different ideas and themes jump out at you all the time when you're interviewing your characters there's so much going on that you're focused on you're you know you have your camera rolling you have your lighting and you're just trying to be present with them and ask them questions and odds are you have a line of thinking that you are following and trying to get out of them during that interview but when you come back and you're

sitting and you're calmly pouring over these interviews different ideas jump out at you that you would have never seen otherwise Mountain Turks underwent three different major text edits because each time I would make an edit I found holes in the story and then would find new ideas or new interesting themes to explore that could fill those holes and I could reshuffle things around everything was agile and I could move quickly break it and reassemble it and through that process I created a much stronger film another huge advantage of text edits is that you can work

on them from anywhere you don't have to be tied down to your editing software you can download your interviews onto your phone you can print them off and go for a walk in the park and sit on a lovely sunny park bench and highlight interview quotes wherever you feel like working on it you can just immerse yourself in your story and that also tends to lead to those aha moments where you're in the shower and all of a sudden a light bulb goes off and you know what the missing piece is for your story without

immersing yourself in this way if you're only editing when you're at your editing setup you're kind of missing out on like the randomness that your brain generates and all of the creative ideas it works on when you're sitting around idle hopefully by now you can see the advantage of text edits and why I I'm so obsessed with them I didn't know about doing this at first when I was working on documentaries and now I do it with pretty much every single documentary I work on so now let's get into the nitty-gritty of how to make

a text edit text edits are by no means A New Concept they've been used in writer rooms in the form of sticky notes and Q cards on walls or corkboards forever that being said I like to use digital tools just because it removes some of the in inefficiencies and I'll walk you through some of these tools I'm not sponsored by any of these by the way these are just genuinely the tools that I actually use in my workflow the first step to creating a text edit is to transcribe all of your audio from your interviews

now editing software like d Vinci resolve or Premiere Pro can do this for free right now which is a great option if you're on a low budget I however tend to like to use transcription software such as Rev it just has some features that resolve and Premiere don't have things like speaker identification it time codes the transcription it's got easy highlighting and exporting of quotes and the formatting in general is just nicer to work with in my opinion next you'll need a space where you can organize all of this dialogue into different bins different categories

different themes this is where you can get creative and sorted in a way that makes sense for your film I happen to sort Mine by color coding who said the quote and also dragging those quotes into different bins that relate to themes that I wanted to explore throughout the story this organization is mostly to help you find those quotes quickly when you're working through your text edit and you think oh I remember them saying that okay that's going to be in this bin it's similar to working with footage bins in your editing program so now

we have all our interviews organized by speakers and themes into nice little neat bins and now we can start laying out the text edit in the form of a story board so for Mountain Turks I followed the save the cat beat sheet if you haven't heard of save the cat it's a book that's essentially screenwriting 101 but a lot of the lessons can be applied to documentary film making as well I'll leave a link to that book in the description below so I highly recommend checking that out if you just want a quick overview of

what each of these beats are I'm not going to dive into it here I'll link to a free article below that will give you a sense of what each one of these beats means and how they fill out the story now we have the skeleton for our story and we just have to start going through and digging up quotes and attaching them to each one of these beats you'll find that you quickly run into the issue of either having too much information too many good quotes for one beat or even worse not enough quotes for

one of the Beats of this story you might even have totally blank beats and now you know where the holes are in your story so you can either go out and shoot more interviews to fill in these holes or maybe as you've read through the interviews different ideas have jumped out at you and you restructure it and now all of a sudden you have a more complete story either way this will give you a nice Bird's eyee view of how you're doing with shoo in your documentary and if you're missing any information so keep tweaking

keep refining from here Mountain Turks went through three or four of these text edits completely overhauled but the nice part is that you're not stuck in with music with creative shot ideas so you're going to be super agile you can just move everything around really quickly and fast and get to new ideas and new interesting ways to tell your story really quickly so there you have it that's the basics of what and why and how to text edit now you know why I love this technique so much I didn't originally know about this when I

was making documentaries but as soon as I tried it for the first time I've used this technique in every documentary since the Simplicity of it the speed of it and the clarity of this process is invaluable it really helps you dig deep into into your story and it can be frustrating at times because you feel like your story's broken and it's not working but I promise you once you get out the other side once you figure it all out your story is going to be much much stronger once you're feeling happy with your story in

the text edit then you can move on to actually editing it and adding things like music and your visuals to enhance this already solid story structure hopefully this also means you do less last minute overhauls of your edit once you've already got a lot of things locked into place and it'll save you time down the line as always if you have any questions about any of this let me know in the comments I'd love to help out if it's something that requires a bit more elaboration maybe I'll make a video on it as well other

than that I wish you good luck with whatever project you're currently working on keep add it keep fighting through the creative block you're going to get to the other side your Project's going to be way better for it and I will see you guys in the next video later