Documentary Editing, Frankenbiting, and the Slippery Slope of AI

An ode and farewell, to the Frankenbite.

Frankenbiting in Documentary Editing

Editing documentaries has always been part craft, part storytelling, and part ethical balancing act. One technique at the heart of this is frankenbiting — the art of stitching words together to shape clearer stories. But as AI advances, the boundaries around editing truth are shifting. Here's my reflection on frankenbiting’s past, present, and future.

Walter Murch said that editing is like being handed a bag of word and charged with writing a book. It's barely a simile - editing a documentary editing IS writing - you're just limited to the individual words, or even phonemes, a person said. 

Soon (even now), with documentary editing and AI, that won't be the limit anymore - that's where this article is going, but first let's take a nostalgic tour of frankenbiting as it used to be.

The Art of Frankenbiting for Crafting Coherent Stories

Frankenbiting is art, linguistics, storytelling, and really fun. It’s about creating a story where before there were only words. Reality? Yes. But better crafted reality. Truth, but a little more precise.

Even the best storyteller in an interview rarely tells the story the way we need it told in a movie. Editors will steal introductory clauses from other moments, change the tense, change unidentified pronouns into the noun they refer to, cut out digressions and then change the syntax and grammar to make it work. We make a complex idea understandable. We'll take a long ramble and turn it into a great story.

We'll turn a story around to make it more dynamic, using how they ended the story as the beginning instead. We'll craft a coherent conclusion from something that was a little vague.

We'll find a new ending of word to create finality, when the interview rolled right into the next thought. We'll find a "furthermore," and stick it on the beginning of a new thought, after adding a thoughtful pause. We'll make people get to the point. We'll make better sentences.

We need to be aware of things like: people pronounce "the" lots of different ways; people end a word differently if they are saying "um" next; an 'l' before m sounds different than an 'l' before an 'd,'

An interviewees "I tried" becomes "I will try" and now we have uncertainty of outcome. Or maybe,"I will try" becomes "I tried," and with that, the subject’s hesitant future is shifted firmly into a resolved past, giving the scene momentum that wasn’t quite there in real time. 

When Frankenbiting Fails: A Story from the Edit Room

In the documentary I just worked on, I had a frankenbiting fail. Our interviewee misspoke and said there were 732 deities in Tibetan Buddhist mandala, when there are actually 722. I tried to fix it, but there was not a 'tw' sound to be found. I tried finding a 'wĕ' sound and adding a 't' but just couldn't make it work.

He used AI to fix it beautifully. But should we have done that. Maybe not.

The Ethical Line: Responsibility in Storytelling

As AI becomes more sophisticated, it will blur the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated. This makes it even more important for documentary filmmakers to be transparent about how they manipulate dialogue and context. As citizens of this country, we all fear how AI could make it easier to construct narratives that mislead viewers if used unethically.

But it could also be used to just do a lot more of what we've always done, and make it easier, and maybe that's a big, fat slippery slope.

Honoring the Truth in the Edit

I've always been careful to stay true to what someone is communicating. I balance the dramatic needs of the film with a respect for the interviewee and what they said. The pressure is on us to make our movies as gripping and entertaining as we can for the viewer and there are times that's at odds with reality, which tends to lack a certain sharpness. 

We have been the stewards of our own morality, entrusted with the power and responsibility that comes with telling someone else’s story. 

I worry about the lure of automated frankenbite. Let's keep having this conversation about where the line is when we are editing another person. What are your thoughts?