Editing Tip 16: The Central Question Structure
Today’s editing tip will help you structure a biography or an essay-style film with one of the most common framing techniques: the central question.
But first, if you’re trying to figure out how you can deliver your doc this year, check out our Finish Your Film Program which begins in a few weeks:
newdocediting.com/finish-your-film-program
Now…imagine beginning your film with a probing central question that, by the end of the film, you’ve answered.
The trick to executing this simple but elegant structural strategy is threefold.
First, within the first five minutes, frame the film’s central question. In the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, this framing is achieved in the title as well as by narrator Martin Sheen
Second, in the bulk of the film, systematically explore potential answers to your question.
Third, answer your question by the end of the film.
Director Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief) employs the “central question” technique in his excellent new biography Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.
Boldly using first-person narration, Gibney asks within the first five minutes, “When Steve Jobs died, I was mystified. What accounted for the grief of the millions of people who didn’t know him?”
After a riveting exploration of Jobs’ sometimes dark life, Gibney returns in the final five minutes to “the same question with which I began this journey. Why did so many strangers weep for Steve Jobs?”
I recommend watching the entire film to see how Gibney employs the motif of a Japanese garden, which helps the viewer make sense of his final answer. (Also, check out how Gibney uses Jobs’ SEC deposition to supplement the film’s structure.)
In answering his central question, Gibney concludes, “He was an artist who sought perfection but could never find peace. He had the focus of a monk, but none of the empathy. He offered us freedom, but only in a closed garden to which he held the key…”
What central question could you pose to focus your viewer’s attention and organize your film’s major themes?
If you’d like talk more about how we can help you structure your doc with our story consulting and editing services, please email me. We currently have a very talented editor available!
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