“WHAT IS THE MACHINE ASKING ME TO DO NOW?”
It was the early ’90s. As the first documentary film editor in Canada to embrace digital tools, I was able to augment my junior editor wages by training senior film cutters on this mysterious new machine they called AVID. The question was posed by a soon-to-be-retired editor who was clearly overwhelmed by this radical change to his toolkit.
While I started my career cutting celluloid film, I didn’t use it enough to become emotionally attached. I had enthusiastically embraced digital editing; it was boundless creativity incarnate. The question, “What is the machine asking me to do?” was absurd. “Technology is benign,” I thought at the time. “A tool is a tool.” This problem lingered as I subsequently cut more than 150 projects. The documentary editor’s relationship with the machine is now at the core of a research project at the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Creative Arts, which investigates film editing and its relationship to documentary style.
The Digital Revolution
The advent of digital cinema triggered a substantial change in the traditions, logistics, and art of post-production. The creative flexibility, speed, efficiency, and affordability of new technologies were particularly attractive to documentary filmmakers, who traditionally work with fewer means. However, this revolution had several unforeseen consequences. Freed from purchasing expensive analogue film stock, the lower cost of digital production led to exponentially increased volumes of rushes and thus a memorable addition to film jargon: ‘spray and pray.’ Documentary shooting ratios increased from approximately 30:1 to 300:1production went digital. However, while the fixed costs of editing (salaries, office rentals, expenses, etc.) have not increased tenfold, the time allotted to film editing remains about the same. Simply put, editors need to cut about ten times as fast in the digital age.
