This documentary was commissioned by the Institute for Women’s Leadership, at Rutgers University. The school had its 250th anniversary and made a film to celebrate, but the IWL wanted another perspective on the history of the university. Director June Cross and I dove in again, and came up with a film that explores the ways women created, maintained and grew their own spaces, using Rutgers as a base to make real change around the world.
Author: Robert Salsbury
Diana: Behind Closed Doors
This is act 7 of a show for the REELZ network that I edited at Peacock Productions. Three other editors and I created this 2 hour special in a month; we each handled 2 acts. It turned out better than we expected, to be honest. Act 7 covers the time period immediately following the tragic car accident, through Diana’s funeral. I got to use a lot of very sad music for this, decent orchestral score stuff that doesn’t seem to fit very often.
Wilhemina’s War: Viv and the Pastor, to Barbershop
This is a section from the middle of “Wilhemina’s War”, festival version. One of the activists we’ve been following goes to chat with a pastor, and then we go to a local barbershop to hear some men talk about how seriously they take HIV/AIDS prevention. We had so much great stuff from the barbershop, I swear there’s another film hiding just in the conversations there. Without spoiling anything, it turns out the men tell us what they think we want to hear when the activists are around, but it’s a different story later on.
As an editor, neither of these scenes felt promising at first, but there was some great stuff hiding in the footage. The scene with the pastor seemed stagey. But the pastor’s reactions are not staged, and really demonstrate the difference between hearing something and understanding it – you see him make that transition.
The barbershop footage seemed like a chaotic mess, and the audio was terrible – there are fans blowing the whole time. But after listening closely, we realized there was something instructive going on amidst the banter and bragging. The audio team at Splash Studios did some amazing work cleaning this up, and the result is a memorable scene that crystalizes the point that no matter what we know, we sometimes still do what we want anyway.
Sea Otters & Sea Grass
This is a video I edited for Yasmeen Qureshi and Lisa Desai, for the Al Jazeera English show “Earthrise”. Great camera work, and a story about interdependence.
Wilhemina’s War – open, festival version
This is the beginning few minutes of the ‘festival’ version of “Wilhemina’s War”. It sort of eases into the story, letting you meet several of our main characters in an evocative way.
We had an even longer version of the church service that was very pretty, but that kept us from really getting the film started for too long. We also had parts of this scene at the end of the film several times before we came up with the ending we settled on.
Dog The Bounty Hunter
Episode title: “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”
I edited this episode of DOG for Hybrid Films. Classic “Dog” storytelling, a mix of walkie traffic and OTFs. 3 camera coverage, run and gun…This sequence includes Dog and Beth splitting into separate teams, some cross cutting between locations. The full show is available from iTunes here.
The Old Man and The Storm
This documentary follows a patriarch and his family as they try to rebuild their homes in the lower 9th ward of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. After several years of filming, it found a home on Frontline. This is the open to the film, which I like as it really sets the mood for what things were like down there for a while, and then we meet our main character organically, the way it really happened. I can still remember practically everything Mr. Gettridge said the first time June and the cameraman John Baynard met him. There was a lot of information in the grain of his voice.
The Old Man and the Storm – clip 2
“Leonard’s family” excerpt • This section of the film introduces us to one of Mr. Gettridge’s sons, and we begin to feel the extent of the family and community that was lost. I always liked this section because his sons and their families displayed the same tenacity as Mr. Gettridge, but expressed it much differently.
Gamechangers – Janette Sadik-Khan
I edited this video for Time.com. I also snuck in a few shots I picked up myself on the way in to work one morning.Before cutting this video, I had noticed the bike lanes but not realized how much they were part of a systemic effort to change the streets of NY city. It’s kind of amazing, and very welcome.