My Editing Workflow for Sorting Complex Documentary Interviews

Editing a documentary with dozens of interviewees can feel overwhelming, especially when you need them to tell the whole story without narration. Over the years, I’ve developed a simple editing workflow using Premiere Pro and spreadsheets to organize complex interviews — and it’s been a lifesaver. Here’s exactly how I do it.

The Challenge: Complex Interviews, No Narrator

So you've got a documentary with whole bunch of interviewees that are going to tell your story on a very complex topic. You need your interviewees to tell the whole story without the help of a narrator. There are as many ways to approach that as there are editors, but I thought I'd share my process in case anyone is in the market for a new method.

I use Premiere to help me make a spreadsheet.

My Background in Sorting (Puzzles and 20 Questions)

First a bit about sorting. When i was kid I was really into doing puzzles and playing 20 Questions. Both of those activities primed me to be an editor, because they are both about sorting, and editing is pretty much a process of sorting. In each one, you start with an tangled mess of infinite options, and then you group and match and group and match, until you have a puzzle, or a movie, or the answer.

Step-by-Step: How I Organize Interviews Using Premiere Pro

When I have 10 or 30 interviews with people all talking about different aspects of the same story, I need a way to put like-things together, like gathering edge pieces and all the blues.

This method isn't fancy — no AI, no plugins — but it's become a key part of my documentary editing workflow when handling complex interviews.

As I'm listening to interviews, I use the title tool on an upper layer to make a title/graphic that runs the length of what seems to be a useful thought. I write a few words to summarize, keeping short. It looks like this:

When I've finished with an interview, I go to the text window/graphics in the source monitor, and click on the 3 dots on the right and choose export/export to CSV. This will give you the data of the little synopses you wrote and the timecode where it falls in your interview sequence.

Building a Sortable Interview Spreadsheet

I go to my google spreadsheet that has two tabs - the main interview selects and another one to process each interview a bit before moving into the main interview selects. I import the CSV that I just exported into my 2nd tab on the sheet, and now I'm going to clean it up a bit in the following ways. 

• Delete the end time, the video track, the layer id columns

• Delete consecutive duplicates (where you put the same text over a bit with a break to cut out an immaterial digression or something)

• Add a column with the person's name

• Add a column for topic category and fill these in from your memory (Keep it broad)

• Maybe add a subcategory column for more complexity

• Add a notes column to elaborate or comment

• Add a column to rate the bite? or anything else you think will be helpful

Copy all this (making sure the columns match up in order with your main spreadsheet), and paste it into the main spreadsheet.

Then clear that processing spreadsheet and import your next interview.

Now you can sort by person to see everything they talked about, or sort by category to see what various people said about the same thing. As you edit, you add things you come across that you might not have realized were important in your first pass.

Here's the one I made for the film I'm working on currently. They can carry quite a bit more complexity than this. 

I use it all the time throughout the edit. When I need someone to talk about something, I can quickly find who touched on that topic, and go straight to that part of their interview. It's sortable and searchable.

An added use of this method is that you can duplicate the interview sequence, quickly delete all the spaces between the titles, and now you have a stringout of selects.

No doubt there's a way to make IA do all this, and even have IA make your radio cut or something. But what I like about this method is the immersion into the interviews that this creates in the process of organizing and labeling. Plus a sortable way to have all your available material from multiple interviews all in one place.

I'd love to hear about other ways people organize their interviews!