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298 EDITING PRODUCTION SOUND FOR DOCUMENTARIES<br />
Now that your interview tracks are organized, you have to begin making<br />
sense of the sentences the picture editor put together to tell her story. Aside<br />
from familiar chores like balancing room tone and removing noises, you face<br />
two common documentary frustrations: (1) cadence problems caused by<br />
assembling sentences from different parts of an interview or constructing<br />
phrases based on text rather than sound; and (2) incorrect terminations<br />
caused by a sentence chopped off before the phrase actually ends, resulting<br />
in an unconvincing ending infl ection.<br />
Cadence and Voice Matching<br />
It makes sense for documentary fi lmmakers to transcribe their fi lmed interviews.<br />
By studying the text of an interview, they gain a foothold on mountains<br />
of footage. Documentaries are famous for their small budgets, so some<br />
fi lmmakers use transcripts to organize the fi lm’s backbone—the stories<br />
derived from the interviews—long before the picture editor comes onboard.<br />
The result can be more effi cient editing, even if the transcription separates<br />
the picture editor from some of the footage. And in investigative, political, or<br />
vox pop documentaries, transcripts are essential in proving the authenticity<br />
of the footage in the event of a libel lawsuit. Overall, then, transcripts are an<br />
important part of much documentary fi lmmaking. However, problems arise<br />
when interviews are edited in a word processor rather than by an editor<br />
working with both the interview and its sounds and images.<br />
When a producer or director (or worse, a committee) constructs dialogue by<br />
cutting and pasting words from transcripts, the results are completely content<br />
driven. The fi lmmaker has a story to tell, she has before her all the words<br />
spoken by the interviewee, and she soon learns how to make him talk. Even<br />
though what’s produced may be the sought-after story, when the fi lm editor<br />
tries to impose the director’s text-based vision on the footage, the resulting<br />
sentences may have infl ection problems, rhythm irregularities, and misplaced<br />
breaths. The time/date recorder on your answering machine might sound<br />
more like English than many voiceovers edited this way. A decent documentary<br />
fi lm editor will reject the worst of the atrocities and fi nd workarounds<br />
for others. But you’ll still inherit much impossible but pivotal dialogue.<br />
What can you do? First of all, fi nd the transcripts so that you can use the<br />
same tool that built the mess to sort things out. When you encounter a bumpy<br />
string of words that you can’t massage with your normal dialogue editing<br />
tools, look for solutions within the transcripts. “But why,” you may ask, “will<br />
the transcripts help me fi nd a solution to the transition problem when the<br />
director, producer, and editor had the same document and only made matters
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