In part 5 of this series, I outlined how to do an edit within an audible sound, such as splicing two words together using a common sound within each word as the “pivot point”. In this installment, I introduce an edit style that pushes some boundaries.

Editing is a powerful activity. Editors can make or break songs, interviews, documentaries and movies, just by the where and how they make their cuts. Why am I saying this? Because I’m about to introduce a style of editing that, when done well, can both disguise the cut and potentially misrepresent the speaker.

The predicament

I’ve done a lot of interviews where I’ve completely botched a question; maybe I do a long set-up, trip up on my words, don’t ask the question properly, or I’ll never actually get to the question. Ooops! Other times, I’ve found that the speaker has strayed from the line of questioning and I didn’t redirect the person during the actual recording. Hey, we can’t be perfect all the time. If we were, we’d never get to edit.

The Staggered Edit

I call this the Staggered Edit because I usually work with multiple audio tracks and can cut each track in a different place — hence, staggered. Then, I slide the staggered cuts together so that one audio piece occurs before the other.

Take the example of me messing up my interview question. In that case, I’ll get enough of my set-up to communicate the thought — sometimes this involves doing several edits to the ramblings to make it sound good — and then I’ll move my guest’s question into place to make it sound like a natural conversation in which my guest is bailing me out of a bad situation. Done well, the results are shocking. It sounds like a real conversation. However, it’s incredibly artificial and puts your guest in a position where they are committing a “light-interruption”. What I enjoy most is how deceptively effective this is.

To make this type of edit work well, you have to play with the placement of both the interruption and cutoff of speech. This takes a fair degree of patience — shifting the edit into a place that feels and sounds natural sometimes means using milliseconds of movement. Working in your favour though, is that the average listener will be distracted enough by the overlapping audio to actually notice that the interruption is artificial.

Do you want to hear a sample?

You’ll have to come to my Editing Techniques and Decisions session at PodCamp Toronto, February 24th, 2007, or wait for me to publish the audio from that session.