The Other 39 Minutes

"When a documentary filmmaker... suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad."

So says documentarian Ken Burns.

Anyone who's made a documentary will tell you that you tend to accumulate a lot of footage. You need to! Interviews and b-roll take up space. And when most of what you're shooting is NOT scripted, you're never quite sure what you're going to get.

Okay, so you usually have some sort of idea of where you want to go with your documentary before you begin filming. However, things can change. People can say or do things that take you in a slightly different direction.

One of the hardest things in editing a documentary is to figure out what NOT to put into the movie.

Ken Burns is right. It's not that it's bad footage. It's just that the documentary can be only so long. And you really should only use footage that helps move your story along.

So, what does happen to the other 39 minutes?

Unfortunately, onto the cutting room floor they go. (Although, in the age of DVDs, there's a little thing called Outtakes. So, some of those lucky minutes just might find new life there.)