Documentary Editing Tip #1: Sound Bite Montage
I’m beginning a series of editing tips. Here’s tip #1, which you’ll find especially useful if you are directing a documentary with too many characters, or if you’re conveying the massive reach of your film topic.
Traditional documentary storytelling involving multiple protagonists limits the number to three or four because viewers can’t remember more than that. Examples include Twenty Feet From Stardom, American Teen, and Long Night’s Journey into Day.
However, what if you have several interesting characters? More importantly, what if the aim of your film is to convey the massive scale of a problem or movement?
The rules can be broken through the use of the sound bite montage.
In his 2014 Academy-nominated documentary The Invisible War, director Kirby Dick employs this ingenious method.
Editors Doug Blush and Derek Boonstra introduce seven characters early in this riveting film about sexual abuse. That’s a lot, but by focusing on only two characters through vérité footage, at least two memorable story lines prevail.
Still, how was the director able to convey his thesis, that rape in the military is epidemic? Through a powerful sound bite montage.
About eight minutes into this investigative documentary, the editors cut together eleven new voices, limiting each interviewee to about seven seconds of screen time.
The key to making the sound bite montage work is curtailing the sound bite to a single sentence. Jumps cuts to string together a sentence are okay.
For example, three different women report,
“It’s just after 3 AM, and I see the shadow of human head over my body.”
“I was drugged; I remember the sound and smell.”
“All I could do was continue to concentrate on breathing.”
The effect on the viewer is to feel overwhelmed with the scope of the problem. The sound bite montage is particularly useful in editing transformational documentaries that convey the scale of a crisis, a meme, or a movement.
Our client Tiffany Shlain uses the sound bite montage in her inspiring, groundbreaking short, A Declaration of Interdependence. Inviting audience submissions through her innovative “cloud filmmaking” style, she created, in her words, “a global mash-up demonstrating the vast potential of creative collaboration in the 21st century.”
To learn more tips about how to direct influential documentaries, check out our new seminar “Directing the Transformational Documentary,” which begins September 15th:
