“The ‘body swap’ scene, when Camille (played by Juliette Lewis) switches souls with the chair, was in the top three scenes that got played with the most in the edit,” says editor Benjamin Shearn. “Music editor Rebeca Arango used stems from composer Giulio Carmassi to reconstruct one of the tracks and that's what unlocked that sequence. The music gave it the rhythm and the writhing, swirling energy that it has in the final picture.”

Shearn has worked with director Amanda Kramer previously, including Please Baby Please (2022), a queer musical featuring Demi Moore in leopard skin, and 2023 documentary So Unreal which explored human emotions through the lens of human-machine cyberpunk works like Tron, Tetsuo and The Matrix.

“Amanda and I have been working together for over 10 years and we very rarely have deeper thematic discussions in post-production,” Shearn says. “To me, the meaning is always inherent in her script and what she's shot. The work can be challenging for people because Amanda is much more interested in every scene being an escalation of the discussion of the central theme or themes. That's how my logic works as an editor, too.”

Kramer’s theatrical background shows in the way she stages By Design. There’s a dark comic surrealism which could be described as Lynchian and her artfully composed generally static frames recalls that of director Peter Greenaway. In a 2022 poll of best all-time films for Sight and Sound, she listed Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover in her top 10.

“Greenaway is much more of an influence than David Lynch,” agrees Shearn. “She has a painterly approach to image creation and is meticulous in working with the design team and cinematographer in that respect.”

In By Design, Camille lusts for a chair that she sees exhibited in a furniture store-come-art gallery to the extent that, when it is bought by someone else, she feels she can no longer live unless she becomes the chair itself. For most of the film, while Camille’s soul inhabits the chair, her almost lifeless body remains limp, while her friends continue to talk at her as if she were present. 

“There's a lot you can take from the film but to me, one of the central conceits is about projection – what we project onto people who are animate,” offers Shearn. “We’ve all met people who just talk at you rather than listen. I think Amanda is just twisting that idea to its most absurd extreme. But I also see Camille as a character whose reactions wouldn’t be so different were she animate.”

A flicker effect during a ‘chair sex’ sequence in which images of the chair’s new owner (played by Mamoudou Athie) with the chair in different positions are match cut with that of Athie and Lewis was built by Shearn in post. He also layered in the movements of actors posing in the chair.

“Amanda increasingly wants to incorporate movement and dance into her work,” he says. “She wants to evolve this aesthetic idea of how plot information, emotions or subtext can be expressed through movement and dance.”

Sugar Babies

The documentary Sugar Babies examines the queasy online relationship between young women and older, rich men. In particular, the film shows how a young TikTok influencer from a poor and rural part of Louisiana, chats, flirts, and shares photos and videos with followers in return for money while attempting to keep all the control and power on her side of the fence.

“Even though it's part of the US it's a very foreign world that I knew nothing about,” says editor Holle Singer. “That’s part of what drew me to the project.”

Director Rachel Fleit had been shooting footage on the project for three years before Singer boarded and continued to shoot while Singer began to cut.

“At the beginning of the process, Rachel gave me a lot of space to look at the footage and see what I felt. It was daunting because we had well over 100 hours of footage in different styles and formats including from social media and iPhones. Nothing was the same.”

Her edit assistant organised all the media and transferred it to Adobe Premiere. Then Singer broke the media down into bins. “I'm such a creature of habit. I always organise each project the same way with all the footage in one bin and different types of media segmented into others. I screened everything and used the speech-to-text function as an aid to search.”

One challenge with editing documentaries is not knowing quite what you are looking for because the story is still forming.

“Something that seems incredibly important on day one turns out to be not important at all,” Singer says. “Or a piece you disregarded is like gold by the end. Essentially, I’m guided by footage that make me feel something. I look for anything that resonates strongly. Anything that I have a reaction to.”

In this case, Singer was drawn to the tight-knit community of the influencer’s family and friends. “It almost felt like their church in a certain way. There was something really beautiful about it and that was my first way in. Then I started to play with audio. It was sparse and very subtle but I just remember feeling something that there was a certain naivete about these kids.”

Fleit happened to live a block or so away from Singer in New York State and would often come over to work on the edit together, screening footage on an Apple TV.

Rachel was either going to love or hate what I’d done [in her first rough assembly] but I remember her turning to me and looking very emotional and she said, ‘This is the film that I wanted to make’.” 

Singer studied psychology at college, even thinking that was going to be her career, and says she is attracted to projects with complex human behaviour. “Humans are not always easy to understand and I think that Rachel's done a beautiful job of showing the complexity without any judgment.”

After taking a video production class at college and discovering her love of editing ,Singer started out as a receptionist at the New York post-production house Consulate and was soon cutting music videos for artists like Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Selena Gomez and The White Stripes. She cut Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball which won MTV’s VMA 2014 Video of the Year. She was made a partner in the firm two decades ago. Her narrative film work includes Taurus directed by Tim Sutton starring Machine Gun Kelly which premiered at Berlinale in 2022.

“Editing is like a little puzzle,” she says. “You're always moving the pieces around. I love music. I love visuals. And I love solving puzzles.”

Working with speech-to-text

Both Shearn and Singer favour Premiere as their edit software and both also find the tool’s speech-to-text function a valuable time saver.

“We wrapped By Design at the end of August and had to have a cut for Sundance ready by early October so I had to make quick assemblies,” Shearn explains. “Being able to look at your footage through the dialogue transcription which is synced to the footage made it so easy to compare takes especially when Amanda was in the room.”

A text-based editing workflow was also employed by Parker Laramie who cut Sundance audience award-winning doc Andre is an Idiot, about a man living with cancer.

“It’s a huge plus on docs because the ones I do tend to be very interview-based or dialogue-oriented,” he says. “On these docs, I'm basically the writer so being able to work with text but have the video moving along with it is indispensable. I used to have an assistant doing a lot of this work but now I can have them doing more interesting things like digging for better footage or working with music.”

Laramie also cut the Oscar-nominated prison drama Sing, Sing and dramatic feature Train Dreams directed by Clint Bentley starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones which was picked up for distribution by Netflix after debuting at Sundance.

“I find it a lot easier to do audio editing and mixing on Premiere than on other platforms,” Laramie says. “Especially on Clint’s projects. His style is so meditative I like to be able to take a piece of music and stretch one element of it out and really slow it down at key moments. It’s an important part of our edit process.”

Adobe has also released (in beta) an AI-powered function for Premiere Pro capable of recognising people, objects, location, camera angles, and more across thousands of clips in seconds. Editors will be able to use natural language to find images, plus spoken words in transcripts or clips with embedded metadata like shoot date, location, or camera type – all at the same time. 

“For documentaries, this is a game changer,” says Shearn. “If you need a sunset, you literally write ‘sunset’ into the visual search panel and it pulls up all relevant clips. Not only that but it will put ‘in and out’ points within the clips in which it has recognised a sunset. That one feature alone feels like a quantum leap.”