From V1 to Final Cut: The Evolution of a Scene

How do you go from a bunch of raw footage to the final cut of a scene? In all of my years of editing, I’ve rarely seen anyone dissect this process - it seems like a black box.

Well, dear reader, I’m here to pop the hood, pull back the curtain, and show you how the sausage is made (and any other mixed metaphors you can think of). Strap in for a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of a scene from raw footage to final cut.

[The More You Know Star Wipe]

I co-directed the Sundance award-winning documentary Bad Press. You can watch the trailer I edited here:

The film follows Angel, a Muscogee journalist being censored by her tribal government. Angel tries to leak the story to Lenzy, a Cherokee journalist who writes for a larger regional paper. If Angel can get Lenzy to report the story, maybe the Muscogee government will feel pressure to reinstate their free press laws. So, Angel and Lenzy plan to meet at The Gathering Place in Tulsa, Oklahoma and our camera crew tagged along.

We filmed a scene that would be a nightmare for any editor to cut. The raw footage consisted of three hours of conversation with very little direction1, spanning a massive range of topics, entirely shot on a tripod with very little coverage. We didn’t get a lot of close ups or “listening” shots of either Angel or Lenzy so, unfortunately, we didn’t have much to cut to while editing.

So, in September 2020, over a year after we shot it, I edited V1 of this scene. Let’s see how it turned out:

That was pretty confusing. Not a great start! What happened?

At this point in the edit, we thought that a U.S. Supreme Court case involving the Muscogee Nation would factor into the the story, so we included some lines about that at the beginning. But…none of it really makes any sense.

And, more importantly, I don’t feel anything.

Angel and Lenzy are two of the funniest people I’ve ever met, yet I don’t get a sense of either of their personalities. The scene is packed exposition, but I don’t understand or care about the information. What are the stakes? What is Angel’s goal? Everything feels stale, and the tripod isn’t helping. Who directed this crap?! [adjusts tie]

We shelved the scene while we continued to edit (and shoot) the rest of the film. The story was still developing and Herculean editor Jean Rheem and I were editing about 300 hours of raw footage along with an endless mountain of archival materials.

Over a year later, I circled back to the scene and edited V2. Let’s take a look:

That was…better? I’m getting more of a sense of Angel and Lenzy’s personalities, and, blissfully, V2 is 30 second shorter. What changed?

Well, the biggest change is that I’m actively working against everything we shot.

After a lot of editing, we dropped the Supreme Court storyline from the movie, so I ditched it from this scene. I’m also incorporating spontaneous camera movements into the edit to give the scene more energy. I’m trying to make it feel like the audience is catching the conversation as its happening so it doesn’t feel so stale.

The producers loved Lenzy’s “surprise” line from V1, and we all agreed that the scene needed more humor, so I added Angel’s “Baby Groot” line. But even with some trims and a couple of jokes sprinkled in, we’re still dead in the water.

In V2, Angel spends most of the scene recapping a story about Representative Mark Randolph. The problem is, the viewer has no idea who Mark is. He’s not a part of this scene, Angel is describing something that happened off-camera and, worst of all, it sounds like Mark’s entire storyline happened in the past.

So, while V2’s focus shifted and it’s more fun to watch, we’ve killed all forward momentum of the story.

Ruh roh. What do we do, Scoobs? Delete the scene?

Perhaps, but our team felt like this scene had something important in it, even if we hadn’t figured it out yet. So, a couple months later, I tried again.

Let’s take a look at the final cut in context, with a couple scenes before and after:

Ultimately, the final cut of this scene works because of what we included around it. We applied the “but and therefore” rule of story logic, which you can read about here. In doing so, we not only saved the scene from the cutting room floor, but raised the stakes of the story in the process.

-Mark Randolph decides to bring the constitutional amendment to a vote. This would be a historic first…

-BUT Mvskoke Media can’t write about it because they’re being censored…

-SO Angel tries to leak it to Lenzy…

-BUT Lenzy can’t find an outlet that cares, and even if she could she’s worried about the ethics of reporting on it…

-SO Angel thinks she’s at a dead-end…

-BUT a month later the bill unexpectedly advances to committee.

Luckily, the three hours of footage we shot gave us some options and we were able to shift the focus of the scene to logically into the sequence.

The audience sees Mark and knows what he wants, which brings his story into the present tense. We know how important the stakes are and we feel Angel’s frustration in every scene. Angel runs into a dead end with Lenzy, which makes the development of the next scene surprising.

We didn’t magically make the Gathering Place into a great scene on the third try. In fact, it’s not a great scene, which I why I chose to analyze its evolution. Hopefully this breakdown shows you that not every scene needs to be great, but every scene does need to serve the larger story.

Joe Peeler is a Sundance award-winning director and editor who writes about the art of making movies from the lens of film editing.

SPLICE WORLD. The world of movies, y’know, spliced.

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