Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1277477
42 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E Art of Cinematic Sound" (2019). "I'm so passionate about sound and sound edit- ing and sound design," she said. Yet, despite Costin's passionate com- mitment to labor issues, "Making Waves" was made nonunion, a concession to budgetary limitations. "My main editor started out as a student of mine, and he was both a great editor and a great sound person," Costin said. "He worked all the way through." Yet the challenge of directing a documentary on a nonunion basis has made her reticent about pro- ceeding with a follow-up to the acclaimed "Making Waves." "People ask, 'What are you going to do?'" she said. "I have a lot of subjects I'd like to do, but I'm not going this route that you eke it out just because of the love of the film." Beyond the question of f inancial restrictions, Abel points to many doc- umentaries' stop-and-start schedules as a major impediment to becoming unionized. "There is a lot of jumping-off -- taking a hiatus, going to a fundraising stage, somebody takes another gig—un- like even an indie feature, [which is] an intense five or six weeks of shooting and then three months of cutting," Abel said. "Documentaries tend to be more all over the place." Such scattershot filmmaking makes unionizing documentaries a particularly thorny challenge, Repola said. Since the Editors Guild is affiliated with IATSE, documentaries cannot be organized d u r i n g t h e p o s t - p ro d u c t i o n p h a s e ; instead, the project has to have been unionized from the get-go. "If it was shot anywhere in the United States or Canada, which is where the IA has juris- diction, it has to cover the production also," Repola said. In fact, the only union documentaries Abel has ever cut are those of Oscar-win- ning "Roger & Me" filmmaker Michael Moore, who, like Burns, is a major player in nonfiction film and thus something of an outlier. "Part of that, frankly, is because some of [Moore's] subject mat- ter has to do with unions," Abel said of Moore's decision to go union. "He got to a point in his career where he could just build it into the budget," said Abel, Editor David Tedeschi has worked on numerous documentaries with director Martin Scorsese (right). P H O T O : G E T T Y I M A G E S