Edit a documentary scene

---
name: edit-a-documentary-scene
category: media
description: Edit a documentary scene with source traceability, truthful chronology, participant protection, narrative clarity, and rights-aware media choices. Use when shaping real events or testimony into a coherent sequence.
---

# edit-a-documentary-scene

Shape experience without fabricating what happened.

## When to use

- Use for observational, interview-led, archival, investigative, or hybrid documentary scenes.
- Do not create deceptive chronology, reaction, location, causality, or quotation through editing.

## Procedure

1. Define scene purpose, point of view, known facts, open questions, participant risks, and surrounding narrative.
2. Build a source log for each quote, action, image, sound, time, location, permission, and rights status.
3. Assemble a factual spine before adding compression, montage, music, or illustrative material.
4. Distinguish chronological, thematic, reconstructed, and archival elements through context where needed.
5. Preserve quote meaning and do not remove qualifications that materially change a claim.
6. Use cutaways, reactions, ambient sound, and music only when their time and emotional implication remain honest.
7. Review identity, location, minors, trauma, retaliation, confidential sources, legal restrictions, and promised boundaries.
8. Fact-check captions, graphics, dates, translations, credits, and archival labels.
9. Screen for comprehension, fairness, accessibility, rights, and foreseeable participant harm; document contested decisions.

## Failure plan

- If a source cannot support a material assertion, remove or qualify it.
- If editorial need conflicts with a participant promise, escalate before breaching the boundary.

## Done

- A scene decision record links narrative choices, quotes, chronology, sources, rights, participant boundaries, and unresolved claims
- Picture, fact, rights, accessibility, translation, and harm reviews verify the exact scene export and supporting source log