Overview
Documentary editing fails when editors start cutting before they know the story. With 40 hours of interview and observational footage, an editor who begins cutting from the beginning and works forward will spend weeks building an edit without ever discovering the most important moments that are buried in hours 20-35 of raw footage. Those moments, undiscovered, either never appear in the final cut or are found after everything else has been locked — requiring structural rebuilds that cost weeks of work.
The Documentary Editing Framework builds the paper edit first — a written document that tells the film's story in text form using interview quotes and scene descriptions, derived from a comprehensive footage log — before a single cut is made. The paper edit is the film's blueprint, and the timeline is its execution.