Documentary has always had a transcript gap

Documentaries are often made in the edit. Everyone says it, and to some extent it's true. The trouble is that most of us turn up to the edit blind, sat in front of hours of interview, knowing the film is in there somewhere and having to find it again.

I spent around 8 years producing and directing before I built Earwig, so this is the part I want to talk about. Not the kit, not the lenses. The gap between the shoot and the cut, and how much of the film quietly goes missing in it.

The self-shooter's day is already full

As a self-shooter, your attention on the day goes where it has to. You are getting the best content you can: making the contributor comfortable, shooting your sequences, managing the relationships in the room, making sure you are shooting for the edit. Notes come last. They always come last.

And in the middle of all that, the contributor says the line the whole scene will hang on. You clock it. Then you carry on, because there is another question to ask and the light is going.

You cannot simply hold it all in your head, and that is not a failing. You deliberately gather far more than you will use so that in the edit you have options, which means there is always more material than any one person can carry.

By the time you are in the edit, weeks later, that knowledge has gone. The line is still on the card, but it is buried in forty minutes of answers, in all the circling and the run-up a person does before they land on the true thing. That is the blind run. You shoot for weeks, everything gets transcribed at the very end, and that is the moment the holes in your coverage finally show up, long after you could have done anything about them. This is the gap.

A running log of your whole documentary

Here is the thing that has never really existed: a running log of everything you have filmed. Not the footage itself, the knowledge of it. What if every shoot left you word-perfect notes you could flick through, or ask for a summary of, so that by the time you are three or four shoots in you actually understand what you have and what you don't?

That is what a transcript quietly becomes. Record your interviews through Earwig and every session is saved and searchable, so the whole documentary has a written spine that builds as you go. You can read back what a contributor told you last month before you sit down with them again. You can hand a producer the summary instead of four hours of rushes. The understanding between shoots, the bit that usually lives only in your head, is written down.

It is also the only review that is actually practical on a shoot. Modern cameras are not built for flicking back through what you shot to check you got the line, and no one is going to sit and listen through hours of footage at the end of a long day. Glancing down a transcript, though, you can do. The moments come back to you, and you can flag them to your editor there and then.

And it means the feedback loop can close on the day instead of at the end. Because it is all there as text the moment you stop recording, you can see where the story is thin and where the coverage is missing while you are still in a position to fix it, not weeks later when the run is already over.

The part that matters most is what sits on top of that. Because it is all text, something can read it back for you. Imagine finishing a shoot and being nudged about what you did not get, the question you meant to ask, the gap you will want to fill next time. That is where this is going, and it is only possible because the log exists in the first place.

From a blind run to a running log

That is the shift. Not a better camera or a faster export, but simply knowing what you have as you gather it, instead of discovering it all at the end. Turn a documentary from a blind run into a running log, and every decision you make on the next shoot is a little less in the dark.

Once you have that log, the obvious question is what it does for the edit. That is the other half of the story: turning up to the edit with the film half-built.