Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/551510
39 SUMMER 2015 / CINEMONTAGE the story and the structure. In the case of narrative, aside from the fact that it has more resources, in terms of classic editing — color, sound, composition — you're able to have a very refined piece of filmmaking, and I find that thrilling as well." For his part, Schopper tries to look at documentaries and features as though there is no difference at all. "They both are movies and they both must satisfy a viewer; they must tell a clear and compelling story," he stresses. "A documentary is a dismal failure if it isn't first a gratifying audience experience. It might have something very important to impart, but it still has to compel us. Otherwise, it may as well be a school lesson." And while Tedeschi cites the availability of resources to narrative editors as a positive, Schopper counters that a comparative scarcity of resources for doc editors can be an advantage. "The documentary editor has many more tools at his disposal — or perhaps I should say at his brain's disposal — that many feature picture editors may not," he contends. "And that's simply because they haven't had to acquire them out of necessity. On a big feature, so much stuff can be left to other departments, whereas on a documentary, the editor is frequently his own one- man army. On a documentary, you aren't working with material that's been thought out and scripted and practically visualized before it came to you; 'coverage,' more often than not, has to be invented out of thin air." To be a successful documentary editor, according to Schopper, "You really have to become a problem-solver many times over — and sometimes the solutions lay in learning to manipulate the sound or master a variety of effects, and learn that 'effects' can be a tool to solve problems, not just to generate the fantastic or sensational. You simply must develop a decent arsenal of tools to solve what may appear to be insoluble. And that knowledge serves very well in narrative too. When scenes, lines or shots don't work, it's good to have a brain that's been formed from thinking outside the box. Documentaries rarely come in boxes." "Being a documentary editor taught me to be resourceful," Tedeschi agrees. "When I started out, people were shooting film. There was a culture of studying what you have and using it to the best of its ability — which all good editors do, but when you're young, it's more in the forefront." In his early narrative work, Tedeschi says he was hired because he had a documentary background. "I worked on The Shield — it was a narrative series but it had a documentary feel," he says. "I had done narrative before, but I think the producers were also attracted to the fact that I had done gritty New York documentaries. Piñero was that way too because it had a very low-budget feel. It was a gritty, New York story set in the '70s, and a lot of it was handheld. It was a scripted feature but the final film structurally did not resemble the script." "Having a good feel for what will make a satisfying experience in terms of a flow of emotions or moods is often key to how to make it a good film," concludes Schopper. "Whatever you do, it still has to work as a 'movie.'" f David Tedeschi.