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Editing Editing Dirty Little Tricks

I define editing as the manipulation of audio and visual elements to tell a compelling story. If we accept that all editing is manipulation, what is "dirty" and what is not? The Ethics of Editing sounds like a great topic for another article, but let's concentrate on technique. More specifically, let's stick to Band-Aid-type fix-it solutions.

I asked my fellow magazine editors and colleagues in the video-editing world for their favorite dirty editing tricks, and some of them will be included here. I encourage all of you in the Videomaker community to e-mail your dirty tricks from the edit bay to the magazine to share with all of our readers (editor@videomaker.com).

One of the most basic tricks (as well as a technique) and one we talk about often in these pages concerns B-roll - extra footage that is not part of the main action. I wonder if there is a project where I haven't used this trick? Shoot or request from your cameraperson as much B-roll as time allows: buildings, crowd shots, extreme closeups of interviewees' hands, mouth, eyes, etc. Get as much as you can to help bridge a cut in dialog or action, saving you from an unwanted jump-cut. This does not help only documentary storytellers. I remember waiting for the sun to rise on a shoot in Lima, Peru, early one morning, with a full moon about to duck under the horizon. I shot the moon for over five minutes, just because both it and I were there, and the director ended up using it as a main plot line.

While we are talking of B-roll, we should mention room tone and wild sound. This is really more of a requirement than a trick, but a minute of natural sound from any set or location will be your absolute best friend when it comes to editing dialog or interviews. In the field, it might be good to grab some ‘nat sound"' with cars driving by, if that is natural for the surrounding you're shooting in, but try to be conscious enough to grab some without recognizable audio intrusions as well. When collecting your room tone on set, make sure the set is the same as when you were shooting your main footage. All cast and crew members and set pieces should be present, as the tone can change if anything or anyone is missing.

Jennifer O'Rourke, Videomaker's Managing Editor, used this natural sound technique often in her many years as a news editor. She called it the nat sot tickle (nat sot is industry-speak for "natural sound on tape"). She would bridge two pieces of differing voices by using a bit of nat sot almost like a cross-dissolve. Be subtle, maybe lowering the room tone or nat sound a number of decibels with a fade in and fade out, and your audio will be much less jerky or jarring.

This nat sound or room tone will help us with a trick our Editor-in-Chief, John Burkhart, has used often. John has found himself needing to fix a problem with dialog or even creating an entirely new scene completely in post. He records the actor's voice in a sound booth and then adds nat sound or room tone from the set or location to match the field audio. To make this trick work best, John relies on wide shots or scenes where the actor is not facing the camera. This way, the viewer does not know you have added the dialog after principal photography had wrapped. I remember a scene from a Hollywood movie where a person was walking and talking with a congressperson on the Mall in Washington, DC. The scene kept cutting away to an extremely wide shot because the editors were probably inserting dialog that may not have appeared in the script but became obviously necessary in editing. The wide shot included many of the national monuments on the Mall, but the viewer could not see the lips of either character.

This trick works for documentaries as well. For example, you may find that an interviewee's answer does not make sense without the question, but your crew did not mic the interviewer. As long as you have footage over the shoulder of the interviewer (e.g., back of the interviewer's head, so viewers are unable to see his/her lips), and in the same shot we can see the interviewee listening to the interviewer, you can add dialog that you created in post. Keep your ethics in mind, though.