Creative Editing in Documentary Film

Sandi Prasetyaningsih

Department Informatics Engineering, Politeknik Negeri Batam, Jln. Ahmad Yani, Batam, Indonesia

Keywords:

Creative Editing, Documentary, Editor.

Abstract:

This study aims to describe the exploration of one of the solutions on technical issues that are encountered by

the editor during the editing process. Practice-based research will be my methodology as an approach to assist

investigate whether the creative editing can help the editor overcome the problems or not. My research will be

running through the production of a documentary ﬁlm and it will be followed by the method which would form

the reﬂection to approach my case study in terms as editing in documentary. There will be an investigation

of the basic editing technique like colour grading to support the creative editing process. This research is

important since it gives another insight to the editor when they meet the same problems of documentary

editing.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the ﬁlm production, there are apparent differs treat-

ments on editing between documentary and ﬁction

ﬁlm. (Reisz and Millar, 1977) argue that the docu-

mentary ﬁlm objective is on an exposition of a theme

meanwhile playing with a plot is the main concern of

ﬁction ﬁlm. This fact brings the editor to encounter

immense challenge on employing their skill to cre-

ate attractive story. Moreover, another main focus is

when cutting the footage, documentary ﬁlm is to more

appreciates people and the event that ﬁlmmakers try

to arrange (Crittenden, 1981). However, during the

production, numerous issues might happen since doc-

umentary predominantly focused on particular events,

characters, and social issues. It makes the ﬁlmmakers

and the editor have a great constraint to work stick on

the script during ﬁlming. As the result, the editor has

to work creatively to construct an attractive content

that can help them to deliver the story and message.

There are noticable time consumes needed in

terms of editing documentary and ﬁction ﬁlm. Fic-

tion or feature ﬁlm needs months of years to ﬁnish

the editing; involve two or more editors or an edi-

tor and assistant. For instance, Crimson Tide (1995)

spent 148 hours to edit 113 minutes ﬁlm. On the con-

trary, documentary editing uses an immense amount

of time. In ﬁlm Olympia (1936), the editor required

almost two-year to have the ﬁnal version of the edit-

ing (Phillips, 2009).

According to (Orpen, 2009), there are no parame-

ter as the rules during documentary editing. The ed-

itor has several choices to explore their skill to do

the editing. An interview section between an editor,

namely Ken Sallow, and Jillian Holt, Ken highlited

his work experienced; he often worked in unscripted

documentaries and allocated hundreds of hours to

choose the proper footage. He decided on amount

of creative works as he used cut out the extraneous

material to do some repititions and jump cut. Along-

side the process, he tried to generate smooth cut by

maintaining the continuity (Holt, 2015). Besides, ac-

cording to (Cunningham, 2005), Geof Bartz, another

editor, states that he used his experiences to edit the

documentary; he pointed out the big challenge for the

editor is to ﬁnd out the dramatic story of the docu-

mentary subject since the documentary mostly talks

about the real people.

To overcome several technical issues that occure

during the production, the editor can employ their cre-

ativity to edit the documentary. According to (Byron,

2007), creativity has a relationship with inspiration,

institution, ingenuity, imagination, and insight. The

ability to create is the process of individual or team to

get something that is new and has a probability to ex-

ecute or proper to be implemented (Nemiro, 2004). In

addition, creative activity is about any action, notion

or product that alter a remaining domain or modify

an existing domain to a novel one (Csikszentmihalyi,

1996).

On its implementation, as an argument from (Cun-

ningham, 2005), editing is fully about the manipula-

Prasetyaningsih, S.

Creative Editing in Documentary Film.

DOI: 10.5220/0009121902650271

In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education and Humanity (ICoSEEH 2019) - Sustainable Development in Developing Country for Facing Industrial

Revolution 4.0, pages 265-271

ISBN: 978-989-758-464-0

265

tion; however the editor need to be concern on par-

ticular elements when working with creativity. It

is neccesary to convey the truth of documentary as

much as possible based on the real story. Some ethi-

cal boundaries should be obeyed by the editor during

the process. As an example, the documentary ﬁlm is

made by the actual story that really happen, so that

the editor will not do the editing to something that did

not happen.

Moreover, in the practical thing, creative editing

enforce the editor to have a high sense of choosing the

suitable materials for both visuals and audios. They

should select the materials from hundreds of ﬁles.

The proper visuals and audios element have a crucial

role to convey the story and message of the documen-

tary. Utilizing suplementary elements, such as music

background and transition, also a part of creative edit-

ing to convey the emotion of the documentary subject.

Be advised that papers in a technically unsuitable

form will be returned for retyping. After returned the

manuscript must be appropriately modiﬁed.

2 HISTORY OF EDITING

According to V. I Pudovkin, ‘editing is the basic cre-

ative force, by the power of which the soulless pho-

tographs (the separate shots) are engineered into a liv-

ing, cinematographic form’ (Bordwell et al., 2017).

(Orpen, 2009) highlights that editing is a process

comprises three stages: choosing material with each

length; collecting and timing the shots, scenes and se-

quences; incorporating with soundtrack.

Editing is a practice that include shots and other

elements focus on establishing a story which fasci-

nate the viewer through a cinematic form. Editing be-

comes a media for ﬁlmmakers to not only deliver the

story, but also present an aesthetic ﬁlm that bring the

audience to feel the story in depth.

Editing’s history is inseparable from the cinema

growth as a consequence of the practice of editing

that did not available before the beginning of ﬁlm-

making (Holt, 2015). Moreover, (Fairservice, 2001)

also gives similar argument as the Holt; ﬁlm editing

theory cannot be thought about as separate from the

historic evolvement of ﬁlmmaking since they are as-

sociate within the practice.

However, (Dancyger, 2007) states that editing did

not exist when the earliest motion of pictures was

made. In 1890s which the initial motion pictures com-

menced to begin, ﬁlmmakers stood the camera and

ﬁlmed the story until the shot reel (a metal or plas-

tic spool to hold ﬁlm) of the ﬁlm ran out. It is sup-

ported by early cinema methods, which applied the

ﬁlm without any editing stage. The Kiss (1896) which

is one of the well-known ﬁlms in New York became

an indication of ﬁlm without editing on its shots. The

ﬁlm involved one shot which shows the frame of the

screen kiss between two actors (Phillips, 2009).

The idea of editing last to the notion of exper-

imental editing approach. Edwin S. Porter’s ﬁlm,

The Life of an American Fireman (1902) and The

Great Train Robbery (1903) tried to execute the cross-

cutting technique which implies in two actions hap-

pening at two places at the same time and combines

the one shot to other shots during the editing stage

(Phillips, 2009).

Editing strategies are changing in line with the

cinema development. The ﬁlmmaker attempted to

explore the editing technique by applying the latest

technology to ﬁnd out the suitable technique that can

be used in their ﬁlm. (Reisz and Millar, 1977) com-

pared the editing technique used by Porter and Grif-

ﬁth in their ﬁlm. The main purpose why Porter used

a cut between shots was usually because it was phys-

ically impossible to execute into a single shot. On the

other hand, Grifﬁth used the cut for dramatic reasons

to present to the audience details of the scenes which

becomes the height of the drama event at the speciﬁed

moment.

The ﬁnding of editing technique in the early dis-

covery of ﬁlmmaking arose as the principle of clas-

sical editing. Regardless of that time, continuity and

dramatic construction were not the main objective of

editing. Most of the initial ﬁlms were taken as one

shot.

3 EDITING TECHNIQUE:

CONTINUITY IN FICTION AND

DOCUMENTARY FILM

Continuity editing is an example of editing techniques

that is commonly employed by the editor. (Smith,

2005) underlines that by driving viewer’s across cuts,

in terms of continuity editing, it can be seen as func-

tional purposes. It means that editing gives several in-

formation about the transition and existing visual on

ﬁlm. According to the argument from (Smith, 2012),

in terms of applying continuity in editing, natural at-

tention signs can be utilized; these may involve con-

versational turns, off-screen sound, and pointing ges-

ture to encourage the viewer’s concertation through

shift across the cuts.

Furthermore, continuity editing is utilized as the

more by which the editor maintains the viewers’ at-

tention, avoiding them from becoming lost in the

ICoSEEH 2019 - The Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education, and Humanity

266

story. Continuity should be presented smoothly to

avoid the viewer from feeling unfocused through the

transition of the story. Hence, the audience can get

the narration every moment on the ﬂow of the story.

(Frierson, 2018) reviews that continuity for the

ﬁction ﬁlm is approached by implying the mise

en scene and cinematography that have a series of

shots with discontinuous ﬂow and creating continu-

ous through cutting system. In addition, continuity

can be executed on the time, place, action and in sev-

eral ways, such as eye-line matches, action and re-

verse shot.

The eye-line matches are represented in the scene

Life is Beautiful (1998) when the man on the bicycle

looks off-screen to the left; the next shot shows what

he is looking at. The continuity editing also can be ac-

complished by cutting on the action. In particular, a

shot shows the end of the subject’s movement and the

next shot starts with a different angle or distance. In

addition, reverse shots are usually used for conversa-

tion or dialogue shots to tell the reaction and emotion

of each actor (Phillips, 2009).

By contrast, according to (Nichols, 2017), docu-

mentary with the continuity techniques tend to unno-

ticeable and has less priority due to the correlation be-

tween time and space; these are not as essential edit-

ing component, but because of the actual historical

linkages. (Kriwaczek, 1997) points out that produc-

ing continuity cuts from a scene to others will prevent

the viewer from having a slow comprehension of ac-

tion in order to identify the novel concern of interest.

The most important aspect of editing in documentary

is to have the sense of the objective for the documen-

tary itself (Hampe, 1997). This can be achieved by

giving visuals that interesting to the audience and sup-

port the overall purpose through the evidence revealed

by the visual.

(Hampe, 1997) investigates that there are various

editing techniques that can be employed as communi-

cation way to the audience. Nevertheles, it is neces-

sary to take into consideration some questions “Can

you see what is happening in this documentary?” and

“Does it make sense?”. Hence, the editor can imple-

ment the editing technique wisely based on their main

goal of the documentary ﬁlm.

In addition, the editor of ﬁction ﬁlm normally has

script as guidance. It assists them to control the conti-

nuity among scenes, such as action and place. As they

follow the script ﬂow and select the right shot to sup-

port the story. However, a documentary ﬁlm without

script encounter the editor to maintain the continuity

in editing by constructing the continuity itself in story

and emotion of the subject. These elements can pro-

duce an attractive documentary if the editor use the

existing shots in creative ways.

4 METHODOLOGY

(Batty and Kerrigan, 2018) argue that screen pro-

duction related to creative practice research enquiries

can be signiﬁed numerous ways; practice-led re-

search, practice-as-research, practice-based research,

and research-led practice. (Candy and Ernest, 2018)

states that novel media arts as one of the creative

pieces emphasizes the creative process and the works

that are generated; practice as well as research work

together to produce new insight that can be distributed

and analyzed. Based on this argument, my research

will be practice-based. To support my methodology,

I will use reﬂection as my method to approach my

case study. The reﬂection method will become part

of my learning process after analyzing the case study,

employing this into my creative work, and lastly re-

ﬂecting upon my creative practice. As such as, my

reﬂective practice is ‘intentional consideration of an

experience in light of particular learning objectives’

(Hatcher and Bringle, 1997).

I will be working on analysing a documentary case

study from the Australian Academy of Cinema and

Television Arts Awards (AACTA); Whiteley as the

winner of Best Editing in a Documentary in 2017.

I will look at the ﬁrst three minutes of Whiteley

and take note of how they approach creative editing

throughout the editing process. The case study anal-

ysis will inform and enhance my creative practice.

According to (Rowley, 2002), case study is widely

used due to it offers various method of gaining insight

that might not have been accomplished with other ap-

proaches; case study is also employed for developing

more structured tools that are essential in investiga-

tions and experiments. In the end, after exploration

in creative editing, I will reﬂect on which things work

well and which do not during the post-production pro-

cess. The reﬂection on the case study is part of my

learning process in my creative piece. (Ghauri, 2004)

says that ‘a case study is both the process of learning

about the case and the product of our learning’.

5 CASE STUDY

Whiteley is a documentary ﬁlm about Australia’s

most iconic artist, Brett Whiteley, with duration of

one hour and 35 minutes. This documentary uses a

concept of ‘in his own words’ and visualizes White-

ley’s story by using his notebooks, personal letters,

Creative Editing in Documentary Film

267

photographs, and other materials that support his con-

cept (IMDb n.d).

Figure 1: The opening visual od Whiteley documentary ﬁlm

In the ﬁrst scene, this documentary reveals mon-

tage sequences of black and white, and colourful

pictures (see ﬁgure 1) to introduce Whiteley, telling

when and where he was born. According to Frier-

son, ‘montage in the broad sense describes a series

of short shots that compress time, space, or narrative

information, but it actually has several distinct mean-

ings’ (2018, p. 206). Montage sequences can be used

as one of the additional elements to assist the visual

aesthetic. (Leibowich, 2019) supports the notion that

montage can be utilized as a device for creating spa-

tial and temporal correlations within a movie.

Figure 2: Black and white self-portrait of Whiteley

In addition, the process by which the editor chose

the beautiful series of images can be appreciated since

this component really fascinates me as a viewer. With

the arrangement of Whiteley’s self-portrait and his

amazing art artefact, this brings the viewer to feel

more engaged in understanding his life story. The

black and white concept showing his portrait differen-

tiates the expressions and activities of Whiteley with

his creative piece.

In terms of coloring, the editor employ the fea-

ture of color tone; exposure, contras, highlight, and

so forth to keep the color continuity and as the dis-

tinct of current and past moment.

6 CREATIVE PRACTICE IN

DOCUMENTARY FILM

Having the freedom to explore my creative skills dur-

ing editing of the documentary, I intended to experi-

ment with the color grading since this part of editing

becomes the serious technical issues.

My last project in documentary was an unscripted

documentary. It forced me to work creatively on the

issues occurred during the production process. It hap-

pened since I got an attractive and energetic subject,

so the subject of documentary told random things, yet

we gave some questions sequentially. In addition, an-

other problem came into the camera setting which the

camera person set up the camera in automatic mode.

Hence, every time the subject moved, it affected the

brightness and color differences between the shots.

Moreover, the expression and emotion of the subject

were out of my direct control.

For three minutes lengths of ﬁne-cut documentary,

I worked in two hours recorded video. As the ini-

tial process, I selected the proper content of the clips

in order to construct the story. The attractive subject

brought the beneﬁcial to create an interesting story of

his personal life. However, since he told the story in

random way, as an editor, it was slightly difﬁcult to

cut the shots in right part and made it into smooth

continuity when combining with other parts.

Figure 3: Original clip of telling the time he moved to sub-

urb

Figure 4: Original clip of his partner story

Figure 3, 4, and 5 were the original clips of the

documentary ﬁlm. It can be seen that each clip had

different brightness and color grade. Figure 3 had

overexposure lighting on the right side of the sub-

ject. Every time he moved, the brightness changed

ICoSEEH 2019 - The Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education, and Humanity

268

Figure 5: Original clip of explaining about his house

and also affected other elements, such as shadow and

contrast. Figure 4 was close to normal brightness and

color grade, but the color contrast in the left side was

a bit dark. Figure 5 got a lot of light in all areas of

clips since the video taken outside and the color of

the subject’s cloth effect the white balance.

To overcome these several problems, I edited the

clips by setting up the color grade on some compo-

nents, such as temperature, tint, highlight, shadow,

and so forth. However, the immense challenge of the

color grade editing was to keep the color continuity

for each shot. Hence, my main concern was to avoid

the color jumping which could distract the audience’s

concentration while watching the documentary.

I tried to maintain the color continuity for ﬁgure

3 and ﬁgure 4 by putting the same values of the color

grading. The color grading in ﬁgure 6 was applied

to all indoor clips as the default color grade attribute

values. I used the basic correction feature as my tool

for color grading. I changed nothing for the white

balance, but I played with tone’s values to generate

proper color. I adjusted the exposure attribute to -

0,4 in order to reduce the amount of light. Further-

more, the contrast’s value was decreased to -32,7. The

bright spot value or highlights was changed to -27,4.

In addition, to make similar dark part in each shot, I

modiﬁed the value of shadows become 9,7. Whites at-

tribute was set up to -6,2 and there was no correction

value for blacks’ attribute.

Figure 7 and ﬁgure 8 were the result of applying

the color grade as shown in ﬁgure 6. The clips still

had different brightness and color even they have sim-

ilar attribute values. It happened because both of the

clips had a big gap of overexposure.

Figure 9 was the default attribute values for out-

door clips which it was totally different attribute val-

ues compared with the indoor clips. I modiﬁed the

exposure attribute to -2,8. The contrast’s value was al-

tered into lower value than the value for indoor clips;

-65,8 was used to bring down the color difference be-

tween the light and dark color tone. Highlights and

shadows were change to 64 and 20,7 respectively.

As it was stated, the color of the subject’s cloth

affects the white balance, so the color grade editing

Figure 6: Color grading editing

Figure 7: Edited clip of telling the time he moved to suburb

Figure 8: Edited clip of his partner story

was more focus on highlight to reduce the overexpose

Creative Editing in Documentary Film

269

Figure 9: Color grade setting for outdoor clip

Figure 10: Edited clip of explaining about his house

lighting as the result at ﬁgure 10 by implementing the

color grade set up as ﬁgure 9.

7 CONCLUSION

It is challenging to work in documentary ﬁlm, espe-

cially when it enters the editing process. I realized

that during the production, we need to have a well-

design production plan as the preparation of any un-

predictable issues. Moreover, as the exploration of

color grading feature by employing the color tone; ex-

posure, contras, highlight, and so forth, I learn a lot

about how to keep the color continuity if I meet over

exposures shots.

I know that my exploration on color grading in

my previous documentary ﬁlm is not fully success-

ful. It is because the problems related to overexpo-

sure brings me to a difﬁcult time since even though I

implement the same color value, it still ruins the color

continuity. Hence, there are still color differences, for

example different highlight and contrast, between the

shots. As the result, in terms of the issues that I face

for this production, I try to edit the color continuity

in visual as close as possible, so it is a bit reduce the

color jumping and avoid the viewer from getting dis-

traction during watching the documentary.

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