It's so true. When you watch it suddenly with one other person, you're like,
Oh my God that's so indulgent. Why on Earth did I do that? Even one other person is like
a little exposed, isn't it? All those kind of things that you think are gonna be alright.
Tonight we are celebrating the female craft voices amongst this year's Editing nominees.
They'll be sharing how they shaped their compelling stories across drama and documentary.
Sarah and I have this in my notes, but I want to know if it's true:
Is it true that you agreed to edit the series before it was even written?
No. I think that's come--I did a podcast and I basically told Matt from Avid that I kind of
agreed, I got an email and in the subject it said Russell T Davies and Peter Hoar and I said 'yes'.
You know who's going to say no, if it says those two people?
It was well written by then, but I didn't hesitate to offer myself up.
I mean, I'm glad we corrected the record as well here.
You edited the entire series with just your assistant editor I believe. Can you talk a little
bit about the decision of keeping this story and the process so close to you and with such a very,
very small team considering the size and the scope of the of the series?
So when Peter Hoar, the director, came on board,
he when he was offered, he said, I mean, I think he said, don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure he
said ‘I have to do every episode.’ So as an editor it makes sense for one editor to work with him
rather than sort of sharing out rushes. It does happen and I've worked with a one director, and
multiple editors have worked at the same time with them, but this was my--I think it was my fourth
time with Peter. I had a brilliant assistant, Daniel. Rushes were always ready first thing,
it was, you know, a lot of footage we're talking about--I know it's not comparable to documentary,
'cause you're finding a narrative, and we had a script, but he did work out we had 135 hours of
material for five hours of TV, which is quite a lot. Twenty-seven to one or something ratio.
But because I know new Peter well, I was working from home, it actually saves you a lot a lot of
time in commuting, I kind of managed it. Russell’s scripts are pretty concise and economical anyway.
It's not like they were filming too many scenes that ended up on,
you know, on the cutting room floor. So yeah, I kind of managed to keep afloat just about.
Anna, congratulations on your nomination and I wanted to start by asking you about
the process of dealing with such a huge amount of footage and how do you find
the characters in that mass of information and footage available to you?
Well, that's a good question. It took a long, long time across three episodes to get
the narrative right and there was quite a lot of talking between all
three edits and our director James Bluemel, but eventually--my episode was about faith,
which is episode three and it's a once the pandemic had kind of settled down.
We had an amazing resource of archive and it was just incredible, and you're also dealing
with something which is still ongoing. I mean when we were editing Pandemic
we were still in the middle of it, so we didn't really know what the end was going to be,
so we had to set this kind of end of the end of the year. But I started editing it in November,
so we didn't know what was going to happen between November and the 31st of December.
So there were—it whittled down, my episode, to kind of I think it was four main characters and
at the beginning I just created story arcs within them. So I knew that somehow they were going to
mesh together and there was one in particular a pastor in America who I laid out his story
first of all, and then once I knew the highs and lows the others kind of intermeshed and
I was in constant dialogue with my amazing archive producer Miriam Walsh who's just a genius.
So she was feeding me things almost kind of on request so there was lots of archive coming in,
her and her assistant as well, Dora, were sort of constantly on the scrounge for stuff,
and sometimes that was visual, and sometimes that was logical or
intellectual, and it took a lot of piercing together. So in in my film, the transitions
are kind of as important as sometimes the big meta narratives, so sewing together those little
things and handing over one character to another that in the end I think helped form the narrative.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but it was… It was very, very difficult.
You mentioned that you'd worked on documentaries before. Can you talk a little bit about
how you approach this project with that feeling in mind that you're editing a fictional
series that's based on a true case, on a true story? And also kind of is fitting into
a format that is very familiar to all of us now of true crime dramas?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that the important thing for the production was
to kind of--I think there's a character in in the story, Tabitha, who's the stepmother, who
Christopher rings because they’re at the end of their tether, they've suddenly run out of money,
they're going to Lille. They're running away from the fact that fifty years previously they
buried the parents or allegedly buried her parents in the back garden for of her house in Mansfield,
and he brings her to spill the beans, let's say, and basically,
she is a character that tells us you know, that it's not her story to tell. So, uhm, I think that
there was different ways of telling the stories throughout the four episodes.
Yeah it was really trying to tell the story of this couple and they're an ordinary couple,
but their romance and their story of how they got together but also
not--telling the audience actually we're not… We're just telling a story,
it's not true. It's whatever you interpret, it is however you see it and we're giving you all this,
all the different angles of the story, the different sides of the story. So for example
the black and white is how Susan saw her past, the mist is their version of the story of what
happened on the May bank holiday when the parents were buried in the garden fifteen years earlier.
Yeah, so it's trying to bring it was almost like not that it was like a documentary but there was
so many elements to the drama and there were so many different elements to bring together
that the important thing was is to bring those elements and still be able to tell the story in a
way that would draw people in. Because I think you know there's a danger if there's so many elements
that you're not quite focused on how the story is being told, so yeah, that was the idea really.
This is for everyone: How do you deal with being too close to the work? How do you retain
a fresh viewpoint when you're working on something? Elen you’re nodding.
Get someone else in the room. Get someone else in the room. Get the assistant -- get anyone
in the room!
It's so true. When you watch it suddenly with one other person, you're like, Oh my God that's
so indulgent. Why on Earth did I do that? Even one other person is like a little exposed, isn't
it? All those kind of things that you think are gonna be alright, suddenly you're like ‘Oh no!’
And when you're in the pandemic and you're working from home, there's no one to give you,
you know, and they're still saying, can you do the assembly from home, and you're going,
oh I’d quite like my assistant to come in and look at it and you go oh no…
But just having like you said, someone there because you see it differently.
That is the horrible thing, we were having like BBC viewings and everyone was just like OK
we'll press play at home now and then we'll talk afterwards, and it's just awful because you always
want to steal a look at the person on the sofa and see if they're laughing and ‘Oh yeah, they laughed
at that big, great.’ I really missed it, I think there's no substitute for live viewings at all.
Absolutely. I know that most directors I work with want live viewings. They hate it when
when execs go ‘oh no can you send us a link?’ You go ‘No!’ because sometimes
the sound isn't so good or you know or it's slightly out of sync on one
of those platforms. And I won't mention any just 'cause I don’t want to slag anyone off
but you know it's never the perfect… But when you're in a room and then you watch it
and then you can discuss it afterwards and then, not that you're making excuses
for it because obviously an audience only ever watches it once and they have to, you know… But
like you were saying Anna, you feel the room, don't you? You feel if somebody is uncomfortable.
I do agree. However, I did most of It's a Sin in this room and I managed,
we managed to do episode one and then almost episode two fine cut in person and then
all of the assembly and the rest of the episodes and even the postproduction was all done
online. But we had very, very long Zooms after every screening
and I had met them in person, and it actually worked really well. I thought it
really did. I think because I'd we'd all met and knew each other well enough that we had,
you know, in the beginning of lockdown, people would have five hour Zooms and whatever.
It wasn't quite that long, but people we got kind of comfortable just working like this. Uhm,
so it didn't feel that alien by the end of it I don't think for me anyway.