Words: Ije Ndukwe
Illustration: Chris Dickason
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It’s the spectre that hangs over programme-making; the veiled process that turns endless footage into coherent narrative. But how authoritative is the edit suite? Meet three editors who between them have cut some of the industry’s most challenging genres.

Documentary Case Study: Louis Theroux

Stuart Cabb has directed and produced a range of films fronted by Louis Theroux, including Louis And The Nazis and Louis Theroux: Behind Bars, which attracted nearly 6 million viewers. He explains how he uses the edit suite to “create a heightened version of the story.”

For me, the edit suite tells you what your film is really about. When working on Louis Theroux, we tend to follow experiences through Louis’ eyes. This means that during the edit, you have to find the narrative when there really isn’t one. It’s rather like a puzzle. If you don’t crack it, it’s completely demoralising.

The prison [Louis Theroux: Behind Bars] was hard because people are always coming and going. So if anyone perks your interest, you hope the next time you see them something new would emerge and then the edit hones in on that story.

One funny thing I noticed in the edit is that every time I walked through the lower ground floor of San Quentin prison, the prisoners would call me everything from ‘English ponce’ to ‘Gimp boy’. ‘Camera wimp’ was the favourite. After several weeks of hearing that in the edit, you somehow feel less of a man for not being able to turn around with the confidence to express your masculinity to them, knowing that they’re locked behind a cell door.

We did a casino film [Louis Theroux: Gambling In Las Vegas]. There was this woman, Martha, who was 80 years old and had lost $4m. Every time Louis met her, you got to know her a bit better, so the audience felt they were on a bit of a journey. The edit brought that together, like there was a continuing narrative.

In all the edits I’ve ever done, we have always played with structure more than anything else. We know the characters are good, we know the story is there, but we play with how to structure it so it’s fascinating and unpredictable. We start the story in a place you don’t expect.

The very first thing we do is a synch pool in the first week. Everything that we think is any good, we quickly cut together. That usually runs at around five to six hours. We watch that through all in one go, and straight away the characters that are really interesting leap out.

It’s great to cut all the best stuff out of your film, see it and say, ‘The life of my film is here.’ The worst thing to do is to walk in with a paper edit. Generally you lose the life of the story that way, because you’re trying to predict it before you edit it.

You have to remember what the story feels like the first time you edit it, and log it purposefully in your brain: I’m horrified by that quote; I’m shocked by that experience; that makes me feel emotional. You have to remember these things, because in about five weeks time you’re going to completely distrust it. You can’t over-think it. It’s like romance. If you have to give yourself reasons to stay with someone, as opposed to really wanting to, it doesn’t work. It’s the same in an edit. Your gut tells you when you’ve got a great moment.

Comedy Case Study:
Tonightly and The Sunday Night Project

Spencer Doane has nearly twenty years’ experience editing live TV shows. His most recent projects include Tonightly, The Sunday Night Project and 8 Out Of 10 Cats.

You edit the show in the way you think is funny. Then everyone comes in and puts their tuppence in. You hope that it’s still funny, but I don’t think anyone knows in the end. Each stage is hopefully enhancing it. You have to believe the process will achieve the results.

As the editor, you become really close to the show because you’ve watched it a hundred times over the past few days. How the hell do you know if it’s funny? You don’t. The people on The Sunday Night Project think I only like knob jokes.

It’s important to have someone make a decision who’s not caught up in the day-to-day process. It’s easy to get swept away with an idea, and because you’ve just seen it so many times you can’t be objective about it.

You have to do the best you can, but you can’t be precious about your work. I’ve been thrown out of an edit-suite before. The truth is, if you don’t do what the Series Producer wants, you won’t last very long.

There’s so much more to being an editor than just cutting things together. With Tonightly, I watch the first part of the show and have a system of marking footage. That stuff goes straight into the edit. Jason [Mansford] sometimes says, “Hang on, I’ve just thought of a new joke.” They’re literally coming up with jokes as they’re recording it. So to make the edit faster, I have an assistant marking points where anything was taken out or where they stopped and started again.

Tonightly is quite good because you could always save a joke and put it in the next day. This will happen less on a weekly show, because obviously the material isn’t new anymore. All these things get marked, so you can find it later.

One of the hardest things to do is make live and as-live shows seem and look live. The last thing you want to see is an edit and go, ‘Urgh, that was weird,’ which I see all the time. It’s something you can only learn by doing it. Three years ago, I didn’t have those skills at all. I didn’t know I didn’t have them; I thought I could edit anything. Three years on, I realise it’s a difficult thing to master.

Advertising Case Study: KFC, Vodafone and Pantene

Jonathan Pearson is an award-winning director who’s shot commercials for the likes of KFC, Pantene and Vodafone. He’s currently working on an online drama project.

You make a film three times. Once when you write it, once when you shoot it and once when you edit it.

With commercial editing, you’re working with an agency with their own agenda. There was one brand who, after we shot their advert, came to us with a completely different script and said, “Now make this film.” We had to use a lot of voiceover and pictures and edit around the person speaking, so you couldn’t see them speaking. Fortunately I’d covered it with a lot of cameras, so had a lot of footage.

One of the things you learn when you work for a production company is to pick your battles. The nature of our work is that someone is paying for it. There are always going to be people putting in their ten-pence worth. You have to get used to that. There’s no point getting into deadlock over it.

With editing, some things are so fine that either of two options can work. But then conversely, one little cut can make all the difference. There’s no rule of thumb when judging whether something is funny or looks great. You just need to know what it’s in your head and think, ‘Is that what I was aiming for?’

So many times I’ve shot a film in one way, but gone a different route in the edit. In the edit you can explore other avenues, but you need to know what you’re aiming for because every frame counts. Every second is like gold. You’ve got something like 60 seconds to get the message across.

Sometimes you get attached to one tiny little shot that you’re so proud of, and you have to discipline yourself to let go. Sometimes full scenes need to be chopped out. You have to be ruthless. It goes back to the idea of making a film for the third time. You have to approach it with fresh eyes.

The best adverts are great films. So you need to have a good sense of story-telling, and understand how narrative works. Also a good sense of pace and rhythm is important. You can completely muck up an edit by jarring it at the wrong time. Sometimes I’ve watched a rough-cut and it’s like, ‘Oh God, that’s horrible. Why did they cut there?’ It’s like a needle screeching across a record.

Words: Simon Harper
Illustration: Chris Dickason

“We’ve used the internet and so on quite extensively in the shows before, but not in a very organised way.” Award-winning stand-up Mark Watson is explaining the premise of his most recent venture. Renowned for the 24- and 36-hour marathon sets that have distinguished his tenures at the Edinburgh Festival, the Bristol-born comedian decided to take an altogether different approach for a performance on his latest tour of Australia.

Around a week after staging an Al Gore-style climate change lecture, Mark’s interactive comedy show took a traditional stand-up performance and turned it on its head. Born out of collaboration on a global scale, the show threw together a raft of content submitted by volunteers from across the world, gathering information, videos, photos and other material, and drew together simultaneous ‘official’ audiences in Melbourne and London, as well as people viewing the whole day-long experience in the comfort of their own homes, via the Internet. It’s a pretty ambitious multimedia adventure - why bother?

“I think the 24- and 36-hour shows have always been about collaboration and so the next logical step is to unite that team spirit with technology,” explains the 2006 winner of the Time Out Critic’s Choice Award. “What happened is that we did things in the main room - setting challenges, appealing for various things, inventing games - and people following online joined in, sending in videos and photos and so on, so the scale of the show wasn’t confined to the live audience but involved as much international interaction as possible.”

Pursuing comedy in a very non-traditional sense, the evolution of new media has challenged the notion of stand-up as being one man or woman and a microphone; where the audience would be different each night and only the people lucky enough to be in the room are in on the joke. Less exclusivity and more democracy, then. But how does this impact on audience interaction in a comedy setting?

“It’s kind of the same idea really; spinning a show out of a collaboration between audience and performer,” reasons Mark. “Obviously in this show, the audience had to be a lot more creative and resilient. And go without sleep. I think one of the things people love most about stand-up is the one-man-and-a-mic feeling, the simplicity of it and the intensity. You could never lose that from live comedy. But maybe we will see more people exploiting the internet to do different things, like my show, which don’t really come under the bracket of stand-up at all.”

In an environment which feeds off the reaction of a ‘live’ audience, what place is there for virtual punters? Online resources such as 4Laughs and ConstantComedy.com have allowed clued-up comedy fans to heckle from their own desk, with the click of a mouse replacing a roar of disapproval; a star rating in place of a withering put-down. There’s something about stand-up comedy, though, which puts significant emphasis on the rapport between the performer and audience members.

“The reason is probably that live comedy feeds off laughter and reactions in a way which hardly any other type of show does,” says Mark. “As a comedian you literally will be funnier, and better, if you’re responding to enthusiasm. If you’re doing a play or you’re in a band or something, you can always kind of pretend people are loving it whether they are or not. Comedians can’t do that, so the audience’s visible response becomes all-important.”

Certainly, he suggests that the congregation of fans who gather for his now-established stand-up marathons are key to the success of such lengthy jaunts. Keeping the laughter flowing for a full day or more requires a bit of help from those watching his on-stage endurance test.

“The rapport tends to come from the loyalty of the longest-serving audience members,” posits the ardent Bristol City fan. “A lot of people do stay for the entire show and the relationship you build with them is quite an unusual one, because you’re quite heavily dependent on each other as you’re spending that much time in each other’s company. You also get people who come in for short bits and then go again; they tend to be left fairly baffled by the whole experience. So the connection that you get with an audience at a 24-hour show is all about everyone being in it for the long game basically, and the people who get the most out of it do tend to be the people who see most of it. In a way the show is about that long-term co-operation.”

Starting off as an experiment, his unprecedented long-haul shows at Edinburgh were lauded and attracted huge attention, despite Mark never having intended it to become a regular feature of his visits to the festival.

“I never envisaged it as something that I’d keep coming back to, which I have done. I saw it as a one-off experiment and it’s ended up being more of an annual tradition just because of the way that the Fringe has adopted it, as an institution of sorts. I wanted to see how far I could push myself and push the idea of a live show. I wanted to do something that no one had done before and it seemed like a good way of just seeing what could be done, basically.”

“I only ever thought I’d do it the once. It’s become a sort of trademark and it was definitely a surprise because that’s what I’ve ended up being known for. I wouldn’t have guessed it would be for something so off the wall, especially because I did it outside the establishment. Certainly at the Fringe, I always saw it as an alternative to proper shows, and it’s weird that that in itself has kind of become a tradition now. It’s nice that people recognise it but it makes it harder to keep pulling it off when there’s more and more hype about it. The whole thing relies on the fact that it is ridiculous.”

With interactive comedy shows like his latest experiment, the idea of not actually being able to see most of the audience might be quite unsettling for the performer. Far from conforming to a traditional set-up, interactive stand-up presents a dilemma - does the comedian risk undermining the audience gathered at the venue, and are they able to engage with people scattered around the world, who are on the other end of a modem? It would seem that while it might put the relationship between comedian and audience under a lot of needless strain, for Mark it presents an opportunity too good to pass up.

“There are a lot of disadvantages,” he confesses. “It would be easy to try to be too clever, when ultimately people just want to have a laugh. Most audiences’ idea of a good time is to hear good jokes and see a funny person, not marvel at modern communication techniques.”

“However, there is massive potential for people like me to experiment with interaction on a scale never before seen. For me, comedy is a very wide term - anything which is genuinely odd, eccentric and heart-warming counts alongside more recognisable joke-craft. So the internet offers comedy a way of moving forward, or at least sideways into new territories.”

It’s not an entirely new concept for Mark, though. At the Edinburgh Festival in 2006, his 36-hour epic journey or mirth and whimsy - titled Mark Watson’s Seemingly Impossible 36-Hour Circuit of the World - was viewed simultaneously by a small audience in Melbourne. A success of sorts, this was presumably one of the reasons behind his recent experiment, amplifying the principle of an online audience and taking it to a more ambitious level.
“Its impact on the show was that people felt they were part of something bigger and grander than just a lot of nonsense in a dark room. Also, it gave me something to talk about in difficult moments,” deadpans Mark. The idea is beginning to take off, too, most notably thanks to fellow comedian Ross Noble. On his 2007 Nobleism tour, the big-haired stand-up’s performance at the Liverpool Empire was beamed into Vue cinemas across the UK. Reportedly an attempt to reach a larger audience without resorting to playing stadium-sized venues, this is another example of media platforms colliding head-on with comedy.

So is Mark - who admits to constantly trying to find new ways of challenging himself and his fans - dissuaded by the fact that the idea is starting to catch on with other performers? And can it translate to an ordinary length show, rather than the decidedly looser, free-form stand-up marathons he finds himself coming back to?

“I’ll almost certainly keep trying out new ways of bringing micro-audiences together under one roof. It is difficult to imagine doing something based on mass technical trickery which was short, yet still had enough of a heart to engage the audience. Not impossible, though.”

Chris Dickason is an illustrator and an animator. He spends the majority of his time clicking and eating, drawing and sleeping. His commercial animation work has been used for titles and stings for channels such as BBC1, ITV and MTV Europe. Chris’ short animated films have been selected for festivals and screenings worldwide.

www.chrisdickason.co.uk