The Hardest Part of Editing: Making Selects in Documentary Editing

The hardest part of many things is often the beginning.

Like getting up in the morning, or starting a speech, or law school — it lays the groundwork for everything to come.

For me, the beginning of an edit is consistently the most mentally demanding part of the work.

First, you have to look at everything.

Dailies can be a lot of boring. A lot of dead air. A lot of almost-right but not-quite-there moments.The first hurdle is simply sitting down to face the mountain of raw footage without flinching.

In my process, I’m looking at the footage and making selections at the same time. Some editors separate these steps: first watch everything, then go back and pull selects. But I prefer to trust my naive reaction — that first, fresh response — as a way to help me recognize the emotional weight of a moment.

But I'm not just watching. I'm trying to channel what the future audience will feel when they see this shot for the first time.

Balancing Relaxed Openness and Intense Focus

The biggest challenge in making selects is keeping your mind in the right place for the entire first pass. You have to maintain two contradictory mental states simultaneously:

• Relaxed Openness: Mindfulness.Completely in the present moment with the footage. Feeling each second for what it is — not what came before it, or what will come after in the raw. You’re alert for the shots that have emotional meaning, tension, resolution. Every second you're watching, you're asking:

  Is this the shot? Or is it the next one? Or the next?

  
  

• Intense Focus: Story structure. At the same time, you're thinking fiercely about what the piece needs:

  • How will this moment help tell the story?

  • What beats are forming?

  • What ingredients will I need?

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You’re bouncing constantly between being the audience and being the architect. Receiving and building. Feeling and judging. It's exhausting.

Making Selects in the Right Amount

Part of the art at this stage is pulling the right amount of material.

If you select everything that could possibly be useful, you drown in it later. You lose the ability to see the forest for the trees. But if you're too strict, you might miss some unexpected magic.

My goal is to pull:

• The core story elements — the shots I know I will need to build the emotional and narrative beats.

• The gems — moments of sparkle, sadness, joy, confusion, beauty. The stuff that’s hard to describe but makes a film feel alive.

  
  

I often go back to the raw later — but I want my initial selects to be lean and rich, not cluttered.

Why Editors Should Be Making the Selects

The producer or director often has an even harder job when it comes to that first-look at their footage.

They are burdened by something the editor is free from: ego.

When you're the one who shot it, directed it, fought for it, scheduled it, pitched it — it's nearly impossible not to see the footage through a lot of different lens

• I worked so hard to get that shot.

• I had a particular intention for this this shot

• This isn’t what I meant to shoot.

• This isn’t how I imagined it.

  
  

All those thoughts are natural. But they don't really help the edit.

All that matters now is what you have. What lives in the frame. What carries meaning.

That’s why I believe it’s often healthiest to let the editor — with their fresh eyes and lack of emotional baggage — make the first selects.

The Flaw Equation at Work

This process also connects to what I call the Flaw Equation (which I wrote about in another post).

No footage is perfect. Every shot you select has flaws: technical, emotional, structural. You’re constantly weighing is the flaw worth the value it brings to the story? At the beginning of the edit, you're laying down the DNA of those tradeoffs. Building a library of imperfect but powerful ingredients that will eventually form a more perfect whole.

Final Thoughts: Trusting Yourself in the Early Days

The beginning is messy. It’s tiring. It feels like you’re doing everything wrong half the time. But if you stay in that open-yet-focused mindset — resisting the urge to rush to judgment, resisting the fear that you’ll miss something —you'll build a foundation that will make every step afterward faster, cleaner, stronger.

The hardest part is starting.

But starting right makes everything else possible.