The Unsaid Secrets of Dialogue Editing
What Is Dialogue Editing in Unscripted Filmmaking?
It’s packed with information, it defines how our character is perceived and if we get it wrong our audience will get bored and go elsewhere.
Welcome to unscripted dialogue editing. No pressure.
If you’re editing a documentary, a reality TV show, an entertainment show, any online branded content or a YouTube film… basically, if you’re editing any type of sequence where someone is being interviewed and they’re not working off a script, you’re going to want to read this.
So let’s start with a question. What is dialogue editing in unscripted filmmaking? Well, quite simply it is our ability to take a long, uncut interview from the Raw Footage and weave it into a compelling and dramatic story. No B-Roll, no music, no pacing. Just words from our character and nothing else.
Why Dialogue Editing Is the Foundation of Great Storytelling
Editing dialogue is one of the most ignored skills in editing. So often, people tend to gravitate towards the fun or exciting parts of our art form like stylising the cutting patterns or using emotional music. But here’s the secret that many people don’t tell you… very often, Pro Level editors use the dialogue to create the structure of their scenes.
Why Structure Is the Key to High-End Editing
One of the fundamental differences between average editing and high end editing, it is how the editor structures a scene. It’s easy to cut to the beat and create a montage. It’s easy to choose music that fits the emotional tone of the scene.
These are not unique creative skills because most people can do them easily. They require little in the way of training and so if these are the only skills you have then you haven’t created a high-end skillset. You haven’t created value within yourself.
What is far less abundant in the editing world, a skill that directors, producers and production companies can spot a mile off, is structure. How we craft the actual narrative in any sequence. And a huge percentage of this is built from the ground up by the dialogue.
Think of the dialogue as the skeleton of a scene, the thing that holds everything together. If we were building a house these would be the foundational pillars within the structure before we put in the roof, the stairs, the curtains and the carpets.
Dialogue shapes structure and narrative. Every single word counts. Every single phrase we allow onto the timeline from the raw interview footage shapes the perception of that character. If we show this dialogue line to the audience they’ll think one thing, and if we leave it out they’ll think something different. How they feel is based on what we show them.
But here’s the important point: It’s not just what we allow the character to say, it’s the order in which let them say it. And so if you want to take your dialogue and structure skills up to the next level and start creating Netflix or BBC level cutting, start thinking about the following creative process.
The 3 Essential Stages of Dialogue Editing
We can roughly categorise the unscripted dialogue editing process into three distinct stages. They are:
- The Pull
- The Cutdown
- The Re-Arrange
Each one of these requires a very distinct mindset and each one is done for a very specific reason. Let’s go through them.
1. The Pull
The Pull is the initial process we go through and literally ‘pull’ out all the relevant dialogue lines from the Raw Interview Footage. This basically means that any time the character talks about something that we think the scene is about, we pull it out and put it into our ‘Assembly’ sequence.
Here’s a really simple example:
Let’s say our scene is about how much Paddy loves coffee. Any area in the interview where Paddy is talking about coffee, how much he likes coffee, when he likes drinking his coffee, what his favourite coffee is etc… is going to be pulled out of the Raw Footage and cut into our Assembly sequence.
Now, in the middle of these ‘coffee’ questions from the director, Paddy might start dropping in lines that are not related to coffee. His job, his family, his friends, his career, purple elephants, whatever… he’s not an actor with a script. He’s just a normal guy, responding to questions from a director in an unscripted filmmaking environment.
Now, all of these ‘non-scene related’ answers are not going to be ‘pulled’ from the Raw Footage and put in our ‘Assembly’. Or as you may have heard editors say, we’re going to leave them ‘on the cutting room floor’. They are not what the scene is about. They detract from what the scene is about. And so we don’t want them in our assembly.
Once we’ve watched through all of the interview footage, we’ll have pulled out every single line that mentions what our scene is about (Paddy loves coffee). We’ll have a very rough, very long, highly disordered sequence of every dialogue element that has been given to us by the character.
Step 1 is complete. Time for step Two.
2. The Cutdown
A very large part of the early stages of editing any scene is about cutting down to a watchable duration. If we didn’t do this filmmaking wouldn’t exist as every film would be 50 hours long. We need to streamline and focus in on the very best answers from our character. And we need to get this Assembly down into a much shorter duration. But there’s a few problems in our way.
Unscripted characters are not actors working from a script. They’re not media trained celebrities or politicians who know how to answer in a perfectly structured 30 second sound bite. They’re not used to summarising and they often get nervous when a camera is pointed at them them. And this creates all kinds of issues.
- The mess up an answer.
- They repeat themselves.
- They go off on tangents that are not interesting or important or what the scene is about.
- They say things like “erm” and “err” a lot, as well as a whole load of dialogue based errors.
So our job in The Cutdown is to take our Assembly Pull, go through it, and cut out every kind of repetition, error and verbal mistake. Any time the character repeats themselves we have to choose the best version. Any time they go off on a tangent or mess up the answer, that get cut out and left on the cutting room floor.
At the end of this pass through, we’ve got a much shorter, error free Dialogue Assembly, at a much more watchable duration. Stage 2 is complete but the next stage is where we see the difference between average editing and highly skilled editing.
3. The Re-Order
The likelihood of an unscripted character structuring their answers in a perfectly dramatic order is close to zero. Also, the likelihood of the structure we’re trying to build is the exact same order that the questions were asked by the director in the original interview is also highly unlikely.
Individual clips on our timeline will need to be pulled and positioned based on our narrative structure and not the order of the interview. It’s not uncommon for two interview clips on our timeline to be five or even ten minutes apart in the Raw Footage.
Our job is to re-arrange the interview into the most intriguing, dramatic and engaging structure possible. How we do this is vital to the impact of the story we’re trying to tell. Here are a few of the important questions we need to ask ourselves:
- What is the first line?
- What is the last line?
- What is the dramatic journey from the first and the last?
I like to think about the dramatic journey as a succession of stepping stones across a river. Each one is providing elements like story, emotions, context and description.
The Career Benefits of Strong Dialogue Editing Skills
Mastering these 3 stages of Dialogue Editing is an incredibly desirable skill to high-end clients. If we want our career to progress up the ladder to more prestigious films and productions, practicing this is an absolute must.
But here’s the exciting prospect… not many people have a very high level of skill in this area. With some hard work and practice we can stand out in the crowded, editing marketplace. Get going, the more high end skills you’ve mastered, the valuable you are.
Stay cool, stay safe and stay cutting.
Paddy