Documentary Editing

8Verité Editing

Building Observational Scenes

Now that you know a bit about the evidentiary editing model, let’s move on to the harder nut to crack: verité editing. Verité scenes, which feature footage of spontaneous conversations and activity happening in front of the camera, are more difficult for one simple reason: you are trying to make all the clips feel like they happened in continuous time. When one character speaks followed by another in a verité scene, not only do the ideas have to flow smoothly but we also have to believe that the radically foreshortened dialogue actually occurred as shown. And yet, the process is exactly the same as with evidentiary editing, starting with the mandate to anchor with audio by going through the material ...