Editing the Documentary Trash Dance: What, Who, Why, Where, and How?

Editor’s Note: Editing (deciding what to include and exclude) from any media product is a critical component of digital and media literacy. In this “Voices from the Field” submission, film director Andrew Garrison explores some of the decisions he made while editing his latest and award-winning documentary Trash Dance.¹

The Project

Trash Dance is a feature documentary about the collaboration between employees of the city of Austin’s sanitation division and Allison Orr, award-winning choreographer and founder of Forklift Danceworks, to make a public dance performance with sixteen garbage trucks and twenty-four people performed on a decommissioned airport runway.

Figure 1 In Trash Dance, viewers witness spectacular choreography performed by two dozen sanitation workers and their vehicles. Photo courtesy of http://www.forkliftdanceworks.org/trash-dance.

I had read about Allison and her other projects in our local paper: dances with dog walkers, roller-skaters, Elvis impersonators, firefighters, and even Venetian gondolieri. She uses the lives and experiences of people most audiences would not consider performers—much less dancers—to understand and spotlight the heartbeat, voices, and unique movements of underappreciated and frequently overlooked communities. Allison’s interest in non-traditional dancers follows in a direct line from choreographer Liz Lerman and Dance Exchange. I was intrigued by how she collaborates in a way that is serious, yet takes itself lightly.

Figure 2 Alison Orr going reviews the choreography plan with Safety Supervisor David Morris. Photo courtesy of Leah Ross.

I initially became interested in shooting Allison as an exercise for myself in camera movement. However, when we finally did meet and I learned she was planning a project with garbage collectors, I saw the possibility of a larger film.

In the year before the performance, Allison researched her subjects in depth: riding out on the job with different crew members, getting to know them, and learning about their routes and their stories. I rode out, too, usually shooting alone. But for the performance, staged on the airport runway in an area larger than two football fields, I used ten camera crews.

Figure 3 Camera Operator Roy Rutnmgamlug and Director Andrew Garrison®. Photo courtesy of Leah Ross.

After the performance, we had ten camera and audio tracks from the live performance, as well as footage from a behind-the-scenes camera and specialty footage from a small Flip camera mounted to one of the sanitation vehicles. We edited this material into a one-hour, real-time version of the full performance. I screened this full-performance edit for a small audience of friends, people in the film industry, and the sanitation workers themselves. Only a few dozen workers out of 250 total employees had seen the performance, and those workers behind the wheels had not been able to see how the full performance came together. So this full-performance edit enabled them and their co-workers to experience it as audience members.

I also needed this full-performance edit in order to select scenes to extract for the documentary.

Three years after the actual performance occurred on that airport runway, Trash Dance was accepted to premiere at the 2012 South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW). Editor Angela Pires and I rushed to finish everything by the due date that was only two months away. Although we had submitted a fine cut for consideration, there was still a lot to do—lock picture, finish the sound edit and mix, color correct the footage, make titles, output to tape, build a DVD master for the press, make a press kit, get a design for the posters, and print posters and postcards to promote the film.

The Problem

As we were getting closer to the premiere, I got an email from the festival director, Janet Pierson. She had been one of the audience members at the screening of the one-hour, full-performance edit, and she had seen the fine cut we submitted for premiere at SXSW. In her e-mail, Janet said that she never contacted filmmakers about their work once they were accepted in the festival, but she felt compelled to break her own rule for Trash Dance. She wrote that, while she liked the documentary, she felt the performance sequence in its current iteration lacked the grandeur she had seen and felt in the full-performance edit a year-and-a-half earlier.

She wrote that she was sharing this with me because she knew the performance sequence could be not only better but also greater, and that would improve the film as a whole.

I was stopped in my tracks. Here was someone whose opinion I respected—a champion of independent films and filmmakers—who, out of concern for the work and for me, broke protocol to tell me there was something lacking in my film. She missed it and wanted it in the movie, though she did not know what exactly “it” was.

I took her note to heart. While “grandeur” is not a quantifiable element, it was crucial to me that the experience of the performance in the documentary feel powerful—as powerful as the experience had felt to me when I first saw it.

At the live performance, I was genuinely moved—and surprised at how emotional the movement of trucks could be. Although I was privy to Allison’s choreographic plan, there had never been a rehearsal where all of the “acts” performed from start to finish. I saw the full spectacle for the first time at the performance.

Allison’s “Trash Project” performance opens with a simple phrase played on the piano as a garbage collector enters and picks up litter by himself, alone on that vast, open tarmac. He blows a whistle for help; the music builds. Graham Reynolds, the composer for the show, was playing the piano live at the performance, accompanied by a violinist and cellist. The music is ominous and thrilling as sixteen trucks make a grand entrance, driving up from a hidden position a quarter of a mile away.

The thousands in the live audience gasped and cheered at that moment. I wanted my film audience to feel the tension and excitement of the trucks’ entrance as well. And, later in the performance, when crane operator Don Anderson performs a solo as beautiful and inspirational as any in a traditional ballet, we in the performance audience felt its awe and grace. I wanted my film audience to have a similar experience.

But Janet Pierson had just told me it was not working

The Solution

Editing is a logical andan intuitiveprocess. However, the brain and the gut sometimes find themselves at cross-purposes. Sometimes it is difficult to know which to listen to. After receiving Janet’s email, we went back to the editing bay, where at first I looked at the performance section and tried to approach the problem logically. Though I had viewed it hundreds of times by that point, I tried to will myself to see it objectively once again. I could not, nor could I find a solution.

After struggling for a while I stopped. It is my experience that when we are fully engaged in a project, we continue to work out problems even when the conscious mind has turned away. In fact, it is useful to stop thinking directly at some points. I needed to look away, to let the problem sit in the periphery of my thinking. The next day I returned to my computer. When I watched the performance again, I thought I discovered what I was seeking. I felt both thrilled to think I had the answer and uneasy because that feeling can often prove wrong.

But this time, I had it right.

Two main things needed to happen. First, the truck entrance had to feel more suspenseful, more ominous, and larger. That’s how it felt at the performance. We needed to set up the expectation for the film audience that something big was about to happen. Graham’s musical sequence of repeating, rising chords implied an approach, and the cello’s low sustained note created that ominous anticipation and a sense of portent. The scene we had cut was okay, but we could give the truck entrance more weight and power.

Figure 4 Allison Orr, David Morris, and Jose Tejero waiting on the tarmac. Photo courtesy of Leah Ross.

I talked this idea over with Angela Pires and sound designer Tom Hammond. We extended the head of the shot by returning some of what had been cut out—more glimpses of the trucks approaching, half-obscured by the rise of the land and a lighting tower. We emphasized the bass in the soundtrack—a mixture of the cello and the actual throbbing engine sounds of the trucks—by adding simple volume gain, boosting the low end sound with equalization (EQ), and even layering another low, sustaining, chord in the mix, all of which added a visceral sense of anticipation of this large event coming up over the horizon.

The second issue was that the climax of the performance sequence, the Crane Solo, did not have the impact it needed. At this point the film audience needed to feel the pathos and quiet beauty of this big machine moving in powerful but controlled sweeps. We replaced two shots with more dramatic shots—good but not enough. There was no footage to add to the scene to make it “bigger.

Finally, I understood that the problem was not due to missing shots in the Crane Solo; it was because we had not prepared the audience in the scenes that preceded it. There was no quiet before the storm. We needed a moment in the performance where the audience could feel a little sadness—a low, still moment before the climax, a moment in which the emotional arc dipped down so that it could then soar even higher in the Crane scene.

The solution was to return a quiet—even sad—scene we had omitted. It was the solo performance by Tony Dudley, Sr., one of two sanitation employees in “Dead Animal Collection.” His workday is driving his truck and picking up the carcasses that might become a health or safety problem. Earlier in the film the audience sees Allison riding out with Tony, who, when he has to deal with pets and the people who have loved them, momentarily drops his gruff persona to reveal a very sweet and sensitive side. That sensitive side is also revealed in his solo dance performance.

In the dance, Tony drives his little truck in circles and figure-eights around the “stage” with his hazard lights flashing, while a pre-recorded interview of Tony telling an anecdote from work is played over the speakers, backed by the live music. The story, about finding a lost dog collar, is tender and sincere. Placing Tony’s solo in the movie a few scenes before the Crane Solo broadens the dynamic range of emotions and prepares the audience to feel that emotional climax later. It sets up an emotional state—the audience has been allowed to feel moved by this work and is ready for that to happen again.

Film narrative is intellectual information and also a series of emotional beats or movements—brain and guts. It functions best, communicates best, by creating empathetic situations. We work with narrative. As a documentarian I feel that goes without saying, but I often think that audiences don’t recognize that effort at creating compelling narrative in documentary. A purely informational film could be happily replaced by a pamphlet. When making a documentary we are also thinking about the arc of the story and its emotional movements. These movements must form a greater whole.

I wanted my audience to be invested in the individuals in Trash Dance and be so engaged in the unfolding of the film that, when Don Anderson performs his crane solo, they see it as Don’s great moment and also as the culminating statement of all the work and lives we have seen. Tony Dudley’s words and solo, playing a few beats earlier, not only invite the audience to come along for that ride and but also set up the climax. Laying that emotional foundation first made the crane solo a more intense and memorable moment. It leads right to Allison’s capstone statement about what we are all sharing in that moment. And so the Crane Solo, along with Allison’s statement, become authentic, earned experiences for the audience.

In the end, I’m glad Janet broke her own rule and contacted me with her concerns about the film. She is the person charged with the vision of SXSW, but she is also an audience member. She recognized that if the film does not move the audience, we have missed the mark.

Early in our collaboration, Allison Orr told me that, in the beginning of any project, ninety percent of her job is to listen to people. I believe this to be the same job I am tasked with as a documentarian. We listen to people tell us their stories. And as we craft those, retelling them in this medium, we are trying to properly listen to that story we are shaping. In the Trash Dance editing bay, I not only watched the sequence of the film but also tried to listen for how it would move my audience.

PBS will broadcast Trash Dance in 2015.