How to Edit an Interview Without It Feeling Like an Interview
Answers how to edit an interview video
The reason most interview films feel like interviews is that they are edited in the order they were shot. Somebody talks for forty minutes, you pick the good bits, you put them in the order they said them, and the result is a person answering questions nobody can hear.
The edit has to happen twice. Once on paper, and once on the timeline.
Step one: the transcript
Transcribe it and work in text. This feels slower and is much faster, because you cannot see a structural problem in a timeline, and you can see it instantly in a page.
Read it as an argument rather than a record. What is this person actually saying? Not what they said first, but what the sum of it is. Then mark the six to eight passages that make that argument.
Step two: the order
Now put those passages in an order that builds, which is almost never the order they were spoken in. An interview wanders. It doubles back, it answers the third question in the answer to the first, and the strongest line usually arrives five minutes after you stopped listening for it.
The tension to hold: reorganising is legitimate, misrepresenting is not. Moving a sentence earlier is editing. Putting two sentences together that mean something different together is not, and the distinction matters more than the polish.
Step three: the cuts that make it not sound like an interview
Lose the questions. The interviewer's voice is the strongest signal that this is an interview. If the answers do not stand without the questions, the questions were doing too much work, and the answer needs a line of narration or a title instead.
Cut out the verbal furniture. The ums, the false starts, the restatement. Take them out entirely rather than trimming them. Nobody misses them.
Do not cut out all the breathing. This is the opposite error and it is very common. An interviewee edited into a continuous sentence with no pauses sounds like a voicemail. Leave a third of the usables in.
Start mid-sentence. A clip that starts on the first word of a new thought sounds like a clip. Starting two words in, on the middle of the sentence, sounds like the film has been going for a while.
Use their words for the headings. If the film has sections, take the headings from the interview rather than writing new ones. It keeps the film in one voice.
Step four: the pictures
Now decide what the audience is looking at.
Do not cut to b-roll on every cut. Cutting away whenever the picture would repeat is the grammar of a news package and it reads as one. Hold on the face while the point is being made, and cover the parts where they are getting to the point.
The exception people miss: the moment where the person's face adds something the words do not. A hesitation, a smile, a change of posture. Those are the shots worth protecting, and they are usually in the material you were about to cover with stock.
Step five: sound
An interview is a film with one voice and a room around it. Room tone under everything, the dialogue ridden rather than levelled, and music that arrives at the turn and leaves when the person is talking.
If the film is going to sit on a website rather than in a presentation, the mix is worth the same care as the cut.