Thank you to showrunner Dylan Wertz (Crip Trip, Wild Rose Vets) and editor Andy Bely (Must Love Dogs, Pamela’s Garden of Eden) who led this weekend’s Factual Story Editor Workshop in Saskatoon.
Over the course of the two day workshop, Dylan and Andy led a comprehensive overview of what makes a good story and a good scene, and showed people how to construct a stringout of a scene in the edit suite and the fundamentals of how factual story department workflow is done.
Thanks also go to the producers of AMI’s Crip Trip for allowing us to use footage from their show, to SaskPoly for hosting us, and the fifteen people who joined us to learn the fundamentals of factual/documentary story editing.
For those who haven’t worked in factual and documentary television, the role of a story editor can be unclear. Story editors are writers who work directly with footage – reviewing what has been shot, then assembling it into stringouts and structuring them into sequences that form the basis of the scenes and acts that make the show. They then work with picture editors to refine the material into a rough cut, with the story editor focusing on story and the picture editor focusing on picture and sound.
As part of the workshop, participants – many of whom have never worked with editing software before – learned how to assemble stringouts using Adobe Premiere Pro, then presented them to the class.
Please watch for additional factual / documentary focused workshops from ScreenSask.
