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Friday, Sep 25, 2015 11:58 AM UTC
“They created abortion porn”: A video editor on how the tricks of the trade are used in the video campaign attacking Planned Parenthood
Garth Spruiell "spotted right away that I was looking at a careful arrangement that wasn’t interested in truth"
Topics: Planned Parenthood, Carly Fiorina, Video, garth spruiell, Life News, News
Garth Spruiell has spent the last 30 years working as a professional video editor, most recently creating promotional content for the Weather Channel and before that tweaking everything from ads to religion to porn for an independent editing shop in Los Angeles. He knows the tricks of the trade: how to grab your attention, heighten emotion, create seamless transitions, or even weave a compelling story from a whole lot of nothing. From Spruiell’s point of view, all video depends to some extent on “lies,” meaning that the videographer manipulates what the viewer sees and feels by cutting out some content, layering in other content, or creating outright illusions.
In the following interview, Spruiell talks about how editors ply their trade and, more specifically, about how he as a professional editor sees the video campaign attacking Planned Parenthood, including candidate Carly Fiorina’s bizarre claims about what she saw.
You say that all video editing depends to some extent on what you call “lies.” What do you mean by that?
Even in the best of situations — say you simply are trying to make a documentary that is emotionally powerful — even if you have no motive except to describe the truth with sound and pictures, you have to sort of dramatize to make it impactful; but to keep it centered in reality, you are careful with the music you play, you are careful with how it is lit, careful about the balance of content.
As a student, I studied ethnographic filmmaking. How do you make a scientific document? There were even official regulations from the anthropologists—to make a movie that is actually a scientific document, you should frame from head to toe and never make an edit at the time someone is speaking—there were all of these regulations to make it scientific rather than to make it a story. But it was almost impossible to do because, even if you are framing from head to toe, you’re still framing. There’s almost nothing you can do that isn’t an edit in some way, and whatever you do you are telling a story, making a narrative. It was a long time before I came to the conclusion that a good story is a well-crafted assembly of lies. You can carefully arrange your lies to approximate the truth, and the best documentaries do that. I’m thinking, for example, of Ken Burns, whose PBS Civil War series is a masterpiece. But aside from the very best, most producers are concerned primarily with whether they have an audience or not rather than exploring some complex reality. Almost all documentaries tell the narrative that the producers want to tell.
So, a good video editor is a master of illusion.
My favorite example is Hitchcock–the shower scene in “Psycho.” You saw the woman being stabbed, or so everyone thinks. But you didn’t. It was a 78 edit sequence where you never see the knife going in or out. You see it going down; you see it coming back. You see the agony on her face. Everybody thinks they saw her getting stabbed because your imagination fills in the missing parts and make it into a seamless whole. That scene has always been an inspiration to me because it is such a magnificent lie.
You also talk about drawing people in by manipulating intensity or emotions, particularly in your advertising and promotional work.
As a senior editor for the Weather Channel, I worked in the promotions department. If I’m trying to get you to watch a documentary I have much more latitude in terms of how much I can fake than if I’m creating the documentary itself. Say I’m creating a promo for an extreme weather documentary about a tornado. There would be the natural sounds in the documentary footage, what we call “nat sounds.” But I also had special recipes of different sounds to put with tornadoes to make them more emotionally impactful. There were other things you could do with the audio using what we call SOTs (sound on tape). We were encouraged by the powers-that-be to get more interesting SOTs, so I would pick an assistant and we would go in the sound booth and I would get her to yell “tornado” until her voice was raw; and then I would go back into the video; and then you would hear the assistant. In the actual documentary you can’t get away with that without saying dramatized scene or dramatized sound. But in a promo you can put whatever sound you like. You also can take the time to do color correction, altering the color temperature and saturation. The first thing I would do was bring down the mid-levels, for example, to make the sky darker so that the tornado would pop out and be more threatening, or even use a different image altogether. There are all kinds of ways you can create intensity.
You seem a little cynical about your chosen profession.
I want to see something that is going to inform me, not preach to me. I wish I could have done more of that in my career. But one does what one has to do to feed a family.
When you watched the videos released by the so-called Center for Medical Progress, you saw them through this lens—your perspective as an editing professional and someone who wants to be informed rather than preached to.
I spotted right away that I was looking at something that was a careful arrangement that wasn’t interested in getting at some balance or objective truth. It had to do with the sounds that they were playing underneath the woman as she was speaking, the kind of lighting they had her in, the kind of cutaways . . . The most obvious was the fetus, of course, but there were edits that made what she was saying much more dramatic and sinister than if they just played the straight video.
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