How Documentary Editors Create Meaning: Landscapes of Action and Consciousness

Editing is much more than arranging shots — it's the art of creating meaning from action. In this blog, I explore how documentary editors create meaning and shape story, inspired by ideas from narrative therapy and storytelling philosophy.

Editing Philosophy, Storytelling, and Psychology: How They're Connected

I've been inspired by Michael White, the father of narrative therapy -- a branch of therapy that frames human problems as arising from oppressive stories that the person has built up about their life. The therapist helps people externalize their problems and re-author new, better narratives of their identity.

White talks about the Landscape of Action and the Landscape of Consciousness. Basically, the landscape of action is events, things people do or say. The landscape of consciousness is the meaning one puts on those events or actions. You might wonder what this has to do with editing... I'm getting there! This has everything to do with documentary storytelling techniques.

In our lives, stuff happens - the landscape of action. Our kids leave their crap all over the house. We decide what meaning that stuff that happens has: they don't respect me; I raised irresponsible children; I love how free and comfortable my kids are; we have too much stuff. That's the landscape of consciousness. In many ways, we choose our meaning, and the meaning we choose has direct bearing on our happiness. Narrative therapy helps people do that hard task of choosing more happiness-producing meanings.

This is an enlightening metaphor for editing a documentary. The landscape of action is the footage. It's everything you pointed your camera at. The landscape of consciousness is the meaning you decide to put on the footage in the course of editing. The footage itself has no inherent meaning without an observer (just like life). 

How Editors Create Meaning in a Documentary

You started to add meaning in the frame you choose to put around the world. But in the raw footage, someone else could still take all the same footage and make a completely different movie, with completely different meaning.

We add meaning in the edit, often by adding words - from interviews, or from sync sound in the action, or by writing narration - but also by juxtaposition of images or by adding music.

Matching Footage to Big Ideas

When I look at the raw footage, I'm looking at it partly as containers for meaning. What are the "pods" in the landscape of action, and what different meanings in the landscape of consciousness can these pods be containers for? A documentary usually has a collection of ideas to convey, and the first task is to understand what the big ideas are and what are the available pods we have to hang those ideas on? Then we start matching them up.

I have to note here that sometimes the landscape of action is so charged that the meaning is emergent. That's a topic for another musing.

The matching up can start from either partner in the pair. Either we cut a scene and we think about what big idea this scene can be connected to, or we have a big idea and we think about what images we have that can be used, maybe in a abstract or metaphorical way, to support this big idea.

Once we have a bunch of pod-pairs of landscapes of action and landscapes of meaning, then we start seeing how we can arrange them in order to tell our story. Before you know it, you have a documentary!