Where to Start?

Start with something.

When we began editing The Judge, director Robert Griffith had recorded dozens of hours of interviews. We had hundreds of still photographs. And because the Judge had passed away years earlier, we needed to search for archival interviews and footage that could bring his own voice into the story.

That's a lot of material.

And an empty timeline.

At some point, you have to stop looking at everything you have and start making something with it.

You have to begin.

Shaping the story.

I've always thought documentary editing is a little like working with clay.

You start with the material in front of you and begin giving it shape.

An interview leads somewhere. An archival clip changes the meaning of what came before it. A photograph creates a moment you didn't know you had. Something that seemed important at first becomes less important as the larger story begins to emerge.

You build. Watch. Move things around. Take things away. Start over when you need to.

And slowly, the story begins to reveal itself.

Finding his voice.

One of the challenges was that the Judge himself was no longer there to interview.

So archival material became especially important. We weren't simply looking for historical footage. We were looking for moments that could support the story we were building and allow the Judge, whenever possible, to speak for himself.

That meant searching, listening and continually asking:

Does this help us tell the story?

Two years later.

The post-production process lasted nearly two years.

Over that time, there were countless changes—some significant, some almost imperceptible. A different interview bite. A photograph held a little longer. A scene moved somewhere else. Something removed entirely.

Individually, those decisions might seem small.

Together, they became the film.

A long story is still built one moment at a time.

And in the end, every bit of that time was worth it.