Why Reality Editors GET PAID MORE

I don't know how it happened. It just it happened. I don't give a about We've covered a bunch of topics, but we haven't talked about this one. I wanted to talk about the difference between documentary and reality TV from an editor's perspective. Your friendship is [ __ ] No, it's not. Yes, it is. What do they mean when they say reality? It's not real. It's based on real people. And that still is true because in reality, as soon as you try to make people that are not actors do something that is out of their character, who they really are, it gets really, really soft in terms of making it believable or authentic. Ready to talk about this? No. And casting is a huge aspect of that. What? If you cast the right people that love to be on camera and they are not very self-aware of their presence on camera, it makes for good TV. You have no sex life. I lost all my mojo. So my friend, the thing that makes my friend then what you're calling reality TV, is it like a game structure? Generally speaking, it's like we're going to take real people and put them in the situation and see what happens. Why can't I do this? It's what we call activation. So, we throw people into an environment that sort of sets what could happen and we just let them run with it and then we document that. Do it and she does. No quit. It's survivor. All right. So, so it's activation is like a prompt. It's not scripted in that we don't write their dialogue, but we set their actions and their locations and their characters and the problem they have to solve. The producers, the story producers on set will potentially nudge them. Joe, you want to give her a hug? Pursue certain motivations that they might have even more. They remember, but that kind of only works to a certain degree. And then in editing, that's really when the story is found. I want my kids watching to be. I'm going to be the man I want them to be regardless of the game. She was in need and I would want someone to treat my daughter that way. You know, in this game and you make people say things that they haven't said. For me, being Ryan Lochi is fun. I train harder than probably anyone in this world. But if I eat, sleep, swim. If that's all I did, I'd lose it. Swimming would not be fun for me. I'd quit. You make them do things that they haven't done to pursue a very clear-cut story line. Kind of like a documentary where you're trying to figure it out. Yeah. But this is an important difference. I think documentary editors will make things more succinct, cut resets and ums and a's for sure and we'll put things in a different order in order to make the story have more dynamics. So you wrote one of these, but you didn't write the other one. I wrote this one, but I did not write the good. And can you tell me which one you didn't write? But typically, we don't put words in people's mouths. No. At least not so that they say things they wouldn't say. There it is. You're caught. Kill them all. Of course, this is a really important kind of ethical line that I think documentary editors have to grapple with a lot. Yeah. There's no ethics in reality as opposed to journalism or documentary. The characters sign a contract and once they sign it, we can make them whatever we want them to be. But it is very hard to make him something that they're not. I'm not ready to go home. give up on love. Often people will protect themselves. And even though they are a certain type or they think a certain way, they won't necessarily say it. There's a Taj Nato coming tonight and Victoria L better watch out. And we still make them say it through Frank in biting, manipulate the story lines, reaction shots, all that kind of stuff. You need to take a minute early. But in this thing, Franken biting, what is that spend? You basically put words in their mouth. You're not showing them on camera. You show some B-roll and then you combine different words to form a new sentence. But if I eat, sleep, swim, if that's all I did, I'd lose it. At the beginning, it was just to make them say things more succinct, but it very quickly moved to a systematic way of making people say something. So I as an editor on a reality show would always have a story producer with me and say have him say this and then they would go on their computer and they would search on all the interviews that

the character has taken to find the right words, right inflection, all these things to create these bites and they would string him out for me and then they would say okay I have three options here for you. Generally we think of Frankenstein as a monster. I mean in the end it turns out he kind of had good intentions. We have good intentions. We want to entertain people. Okay, that's a good intention. I get that. Every editor knows that moment, that perfect cut, that seamless transition, that final frame that locks into place. But imagine that moment and winning prizes and gears worth $75,000 plus. Film Supply Editfest is your chance to create, submit, and win. It's a 30-day challenge where you cut a title sequence, an ad, or a movie trailer. Where are you? Using cinematic film supply footage. Do you still remember? And here's the kicker. You'll be judged by top industry pros and compete for cash prizes and gear worth $75,000. If you're anything like me, you embrace challenges that push your storytelling skills. Now, this isn't just another gig. This is an opportunity to challenge yourself creatively. The right person might be watching. So download your starter kit and start cutting today. Happy editing. Cheers. Documentary editors find those moments and put them in an order that isn't necessarily the order they happened in order to make something not just make sense, but be significant to an audience. So, are we really talking about something that's very blurry? Oh, yeah. I cut a documentary about the alt-right, and we had a main character, Richard Spencer, who's like a right-wing nut job. He wouldn't say the things that he was thinking, and I would cut him knowing that I could live with it. This might very well go off totally peacefully. This might become violent. I mean, that is certainly within the realm of possibilities. Basically, um, my policy is just absolutely never back down. He's just trying to be more careful using coded language as opposed to saying it straight. So, I have a friend who's a brilliant documentary maker and she came and talked to my students once and she said, "What I do is with characters at the end of the process, I'll show them a cut just before we lock off and I'll do the beer test. " and she says, "I've constructed them as a character into the story, and if they'll still have a beer with me after seeing that story, I know it's okay. " Yeah, we would have failed that test. I mean, we really made sure that we stand by the documentary. So, we would have people say what they want to say. The ethnostate and as I conceive it is a post American possibility. So, it is a kind of postrevolutionary idea. But then we would counter cut it with an expert filling in the context. Do you think they're going to leave? Uh because Richard Spencer would like them to. You know, the ideology is a prescription for mass murder. So that people could make up their own mind. Partition triggered one of the largest migrations in human history. Between 1 and 2 million people died in the process. Would be just a total renewal of whites as a people. I have a question for you. When I studied first in Berlin, I went to film school here in LA, but before I studied in Berlin, communication and I had a journalism class. So the professor pretty much told us there is no objectivity in journalism. You are going to have an agenda when you go in and report a story. And so don't pretend that you are objective. Do all your W's and cover all the facts and get your two sources, but don't lie to yourself. pretend you're telling the truth. We've been talking about ethics. What is your take on that position? I think your media communications instructor was correct. There isn't really any such thing as objectivity in the sense that none of us can leave behind our own experience and our own point of view. And whenever we pick up a camera or certainly when we start to get into editing somebody, we need to acknowledge that is our point of view. That we can't help but cut it with the perspective. It bothers me a lot now that media doesn't um acknowledge its own presence and perspective because we know there's a difference between the way Fox News and the New York Times reports things. Maybe this is a difference between reality and documentary. You spoke earlier about the filmmaker's voice and that is the filmmaker acknowledging at some level that this is not objective. This is their voice. This is their perspective and that in fact is a value in documentary as being the perspective of someone who cares as opposed to

a kind of a pretense of this is what really happened. Is that pretense existing in reality TV that this is what really happened? I would say it's probably an unspoken agreement between the audience that we've learned that reality is not real but I don't think it's being acknowledged. So, the audience is not stupid. You're saying the audience knows this is not reality and the reality TV makers know it's not reality, but we have this some kind of weird agreement that we're going to call it reality even though we know it's not reality. I think that's your tag for this episode. Reality is not reality. What is it? Is a suspension of disbelief, right? It's suspension of disbelief. But they use that expression in fiction when you like you go to a play and you know you can see that's a stage and you're in the audience and you know they're an actor, but you allow yourself to let go of that as a conscious awareness and get really involved in the characters and the situation being portrayed. I guess that's kind of the trick in reality TV, which is like you're not being presented with this frame that says this is not real, this is fiction. Would you say that frame is not operating in the same way in something that we call a documentary? If you think about it, it's worse with documentary because we think that documentaries are true. Documentaries play with the fact that if we see it, we believe it. Uh, look, I have to say I think that has been a huge issue in documentary history. What's being created is cinema. It's not just a record. I think that's first of all really important. And if that's acknowledged that that's the contract and I think that part of that is that the audience knows they're seeing the perspective of an individual filmmaker. It's the ethical framework that says this isn't reality, but it is a perspective on reality that we're making into a cinematic experience for you so you have some feeling or understanding of it. With reality TV, are you working with a really different set of intentions? Yes. The editor tends to be in reality the driving creative voice. Their skill is to see and think out of the box what the story could be to a point where when they cut a scripted show, they feel like it's easy. What's different in this context where you're doing indie fiction documentary like the fictions, you know, might even be semi-improvised at some point. Actually, the first movie that I cut for Mark was basically that it was all improvised with his real son that was like 2 3 years old. The fictitious side of the story was that the mother had died in a car accident and it was like the father trying to deal with this now that he has to raise this child on his own. What stuff? Some trains. Yeah, I dreamt about trains. What can I eat, Dad? H what can we eat? And the kid had no idea that he's in a movie. Mom is fine. She's just not there. But he was trying to get all these scenes done with this kid going through the motion of this. He actually called it cinema reality. I mean there's a tradition of that. You know there's like Italian neo realalism is you know we see that happening there. It's staged in exactly that way. It's still super creative which I love having that bond with a director in having a filmmaker with a vision that you're supporting feeling like you're making a difference. So, it's pushing the envelope, but I'm getting the sense you don't feel like that was happening in reality TV and that's why you left. It depends a little bit on the show. I mean, I was kind of second generation, so I wasn't in that first wave of Survivor, Big Brother, but I've worked with those editors. They were kind of my mentors. We are going to be punished by this continent. And it still felt like pretty exciting for me personally. I still enjoy watching it. I don't necessarily enjoy making it anymore. Whale Wars was a show highly entertaining but also incredibly meaningful in terms of how it changed the whaling industry. I will not move. You will have to sink me right here next to the sun morale. I am not going to move for you. I find that more engaging than watching like Criminal Minds or whatever show where it's just a formula. It has no impact. The story is subpar to what great film making is. It's not on that level. But reality can get there pretty fast as soon as you have the right people putting them in interesting situations because they're being real. What was happening for you? I have autism. Doctors told my parents that I would never live independently, hold a job, that at most I could hope to marry someone else with autism. I have these things called episodes where when I get extremely

overstimulated, I will get ungrounded and I'll lose control of myself. and I started screaming and everyone saw that and I know nobody else knew what was going on but Joe knew because I needed someone in this game to understand what was going on in case something happened and that means the world to me and that's beyond this game that we're on different teams but he was willing to make sure that I was okay. What I'm hearing is that you're really interested in the way that people are real that pulls you in as an audience member. So, you feel the kinds of cinematic empathy that you would with a really well-directed fiction film or a really welldesigned documentary. And I guess, you know, that's a slippery slope in a way. Like, I know people who watch Say Yes to the Dress, right? To them, it's really important. Who do you think I don't like this and stuff. It's just about dresses. But that connection does become possible. Are you saying yes to the dress? Yes. We're talking about the themes and the characters were kind of circling pretty close to the land of documentary or quality fiction in a way. So I guess I'm wondering then is it one of the real differences for an editor in process when you're sitting with documentary material trying to decide on the order watching everything trying to figure out who's the lead character and what their story is going to be. Is that different than when you get handed raw material from a reality show? I feel like in documentary it's a little bit more structurally loose. You get a lot of footage and you don't know whether that's the beginning, middle, or the end of the documentary when you get it. You kind of just have to select it by big ideas, big characters, big themes, and then figure out what is the story, what's the ending. In reality, you have a better plan. When you get down to like a competition reality, it's very formulaic. Act two is reward challenge. Act four is immunity challenge and then act one is kind of a little bit recap and setup from the previous episode. Act three is kind of that emotional beat of something that happened. Should we vote? Act five is always going to be tribal council voting somebody off. I think it's more appropriate tonight to say the game has spoken. So Sven, I think we need to just do a little recap here on some of the gold that you have uh put out there for listeners. I don't know if we solved the problem of what's the difference between documentary and reality. I think we might have got to an understanding that it's a spectrum. It has a lot to do with intent. Is the difference between documentary structurally more open and requires more discovery? Whereas in reality, even though it doesn't have the dialogue written into the script, you we have a scripted structure that has been shot and that is expected. So, it's more closed. What's interesting is even though the filmmaker and the corporation both trust you the editor to come up with the story, they are trusting you to do a kind of a different thing. One is the individual filmmaker's intent and one is the more please the network format driven intent but you as an editor still have to do the understanding and this problem solving. Number one thing about a really good editor is that they see the story not within the constraints of the script or the treatment kind of in the footage and the potential of what you can make the footage say and that gets really exciting gets very fresh and authentic and interesting. That's what great editors get paid for to do things and elevate them. How do you get there? You got to cut a lot and you got to be super open-minded. A lot of editors go into editing thinking it has to be one way because they need direction, they need a script, they need all these things answered. They don't need any of that. They just need the footage and just a wild imagination of what it could be. Boldly cut it. Cut boldly. Love it. And see into the story, you know, see what could be there. In this game of hide and seek, you can't catch me.