Whether an editor is working on a documentary or a fictional drama, there are often sensitive subjects that need to be presented with care. Editing Life and Death Row – Execution, Rupert Houseman found the balance of being dramatic without salacious a challenge. He said: “That was a balance, a constant wrestle of pushing things as far as we can push them without being grotesque.”
Similarly, Ben Stark wrestled with using archive footage that featured those who lost their lives when editing Tsunami: Survivors’ Stories. He had to handle this footage sensitively because “you’ve got to be aware that that is someone’s family, that’s the last moments of this existence, that’s where those conversations come up… there’s something you have to feel in the moment, sometimes there are moments which you would immediately say are over the line but in the context of the film you can go there.”
Úna Ní Dhonghaíle’s experience editing The Missing was different because it was a drama series, but still had challenging themes to conquer. She said: “The script was this thriller with a puzzle but implicit in that was the loss of a child… We still had a moral responsibility, although it’s a fiction, not to be gratuitous in cashing in on this child going missing.”
When editing the series, she often kept it simple to allow the emotion space to breathe. She recalled thinking: “We don’t want to overegg this because it’s inherent in the material, so we didn’t have to put music on, you don’t have to over-emotionalise the whole thing because it was already there.” This choice was made “because the audience at home of course get involved in the fiction and they begin to live through these characters and identify with them as much as you would a documentary… so we did try and tread with caution and with respect to the subject because it’s every family’s nightmare.”
