I served as the editor for the feature documentary Vote Jesus: The Chronicles of Ken Stevenson, starring a perennial “underground” presidential candidate and social media icon named Vermin Supreme. The film’s Director, Vic David, and I worked through an exhaustive process of editing and re-editing scenes; crafting a coherent depiction of Vermin Supreme’s postmodern exploits.

Editing a documentary is nothing at all like editing a narrative. A narrative film will have a refined script and footage that is perfectly slated and labeled right out of the camera. And while editing a narrative you will have footage and maybe even entire scenes that aren’t used. A documentary typically has orders of magnitude more footage that you must whittle down to an interesting and cohesive story.

This was a difficult project because of the nature of the medium. Yet, it was incredibly rewarding as it gave me critical experience editing non-fiction footage, taught me what angles to capture when I would eventually shoot non-fiction material, and set me down the path of creating my own feature documentary film.