Episode 40: Shaping Real Life into Story: a Documentary Editor’s View Jean Kawahara

Jean Kawahara is a documentary editor as well as a writer, and she had great insights into the process of shaping real life events into a story. How do you wrangle thousands of hours of footage into a compelling, small package–on deadline? How do you find, create or support drama? What do you look for when you’re looking for story? We talked about forms for crafting story: contests, chronology, rhythm and the need for omission. We discussed stakes and consequences and how to set them up, the importance of avoiding repeat beats, and the fact that directors and writers often miss perceive which are actually the strongest scenes. We got into the dangers of the desire to explain to your audience what’s going on in your story and the attention span of the modern audience. Jean gave advice about avoiding the fine work before you nail down the broad structure, so you don’t get attached to one way of seeing the story unfold. And we looked at endings: how to find and craft an authentic ending out of the ongoing flow of life…

Links Discussed:

Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker

T-Rex, documentary film

Book in a Year

On Directing by David Mamet

Sergei M. Eisenstein

Claudia Rankings keynote speech at AWP

On James Patterson’s publishing collaborative work

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life by Bob Rotella; Bob Cullen

The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by W. Timothy Gallwey; Pete Carroll

Adrienne Rich’s Poetry Became Political, but It Remained Rooted in Material Fact by Wayne Koestenbaum

Hamilton, the musical

Mo’ Meta Blues The World According to Questlove by Ahmir Thompson; Ben Greenman; Questlove

Stories We Tell, Directed by Sarah Polley

The Literature of War: Who gets to tell the story?

Jean Kawahara

Jean Kawahara’s independent film credits include the feature documentaries, T-Rex;

City of Borders; Yank Tanks; Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story

and the narrative feature, Nail Polish. She was the consulting editor on the

documentary, Semper Fi: Always Faithful, which won the best editing award at the 2011

Tribeca Film Festival and was short-listed for the 2012 Academy Awards. Kawahara co-

edited the New York Times documentary short series, Robotica and several segments

of the YouTube documentary series, American Hipster. She is currently editing a feature

documentary about the first solar powered airplane to fly around the world.

T-Rex premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, won the Audience Award at the San

Francisco Film Festival and will air on PBS’ Independent Lens in August 2016. City of

Borders garnered the Teddy Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival and aired on

various PBS stations. Yank Tanks was voted Best Documentary at the 2002 Los

Angeles Latino International Film Festival. Of Civil Wrongs and Rights won an Emmy for

Best Editing and Directing at the 2001 National Academy of Television Arts and

Sciences News and Documentary Emmy Awards. The film was also short-listed for the

2001 Academy awards and aired nation-wide on the PBS program P.O.V.

Kawahara edited short films that played at the Sundance Film Festival and received

awards for her commercial work, including a Golden Lion at the Cannes Film Festival

and a Clio.

Kawahara began her career in the San Francisco broadcast television industry as a

writer/producer for a news and entertainment show produced by KPIX in San Francisco.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities from UC Berkeley and a Master’s degree in

Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.