Interview: Kenny Miracle
Kenny Miracle is an independent filmmaker and editor who has spent the last 20 years creating mission-driven films. He’s worked on multiple award-winning films, and I’ve also had the privilege of working with him and knowing him for most of that time. He was kind enough to answer a few questions via email. (Edited for clarity.)
What is your first step when you start working on a new film?
The first step is to actually talk with the director. Get their vision and their ideas for the film. What are they going for? Hear from them about what footage they shot, why they shot it. The next thing, which is the first real tangible work, would be just watching and organizing the footage. I tend to do those two together. I will watch and organize while I'm watching. There's lots of different methods to organizing, depending on what program I'm using and what type of footage it is.
How do you find the backbone or the through line of a documentary?
You know this is I think one of the most complicated things to do when editing a documentary. There's a couple places where directors, especially in the Indie world where I tend to work a lot, get stuck. They get stuck initially with trying to get funding for their film and then the next big hurdle is actually like the filming process, actually going out and taking the time and the energy and and getting good footage that actually matches their vision. If they get through those hurdles, the next big hurdle is finding the actual story.
The raw footage rarely reflects the original intention and vision of a project. My job is to find that. I spent a lot of years studying story, development, and screenwriting and just watching documentaries and trying to hone in my intuition. [Then] I would [edit and] show it to the director. Does this work? Is this matching what you're wanting? It's a lot of trial and error. Finding the through line can be a playful process, it has to be because you have to discover it. I'll find a consistency in the types of questions of director is asking, and then I will create thematic soundbites buckets in my editing program that aligns with the direction of the questioning. Sometimes this is just two or three buckets, sometimes it's 20 or 30 different buckets.
Documentaries can throw curveballs at you at any time. What is an unexpected twist that stands out to you and your career and how did you respond?
Yeah, I mean every documentary does come with its own curveballs and unexpected twists. I knew going in a documentary film filmmaking that there was going to be lots of twist and turns so I had to approach it from a very flexible standpoint. So when things change, just be prepared for that.
There's a difference when you're working on it with a documentary team that's flexible to changes versus a documentary team that's not flexible. [You have to] follow the story where it takes you, [and] not force the story down the direction that you wanted to go as a filmmaker.
How do you create emotional connection with audience in a documentary?
One of the first things lessons I learned in film school is people care about people. You have to craft stories, craft the film, around human stories. I find [this] is the number one way to create emotional connection.
And this is coming from somebody who often makes very expository topical films that are meant to explain heavy, complicated topics. So I'm always on the lookout for how do I find the human stories? Where are the human stories that actually align with this message and this topic for the documentary? Otherwise, it's just a cinematic PSA.
Secondly I would say the music helps create emotion. This is whether it's a human story or a topic. I have worked on talking-head documentaries that are topical, but that actually carry emotional weight because what the music is like. Maybe we're interviewing a series of experts about a particular topic and they're talking about something kind of sad or intense—and making sure they're talking about it with an empathetic tone as opposed to a a very dry tone—and then making sure the music is reflecting the intent of the emotion that they're going for. If they aren't, if I have to include some soundbite from an expert maybe about a intense topic and their delivery is really bad, but they're the only one that says this essential thing, that's where the music kind of helps carry a little bit of that emotion. [But] you gotta be careful to not make it melodramatic.
What do you wish other filmmakers knew about the editing process?
I work with a lot of first-time, second-time filmmakers [and] it takes a lot longer than whatever they think it's going to take. The process of actually going through [the footage]. Cameras nowadays, you can go out and shoot a lot of footage really easily and people tend to think that they can get an edit in a shorter amount of time then it took them to shoot it. But really it takes at least 3 to 4 times longer than it took to shoot it to edit it. And that's often just an initial edit. The longer it gets if you go from a five-minute video or a fifteen-minute video to an hour and a half video. It becomes so time-consuming sifting through all the footage [and] finding the story.
You have to exponentially add the time. Then that means adding to the budget. [So] it's important to have the right people on your team. You know, the director, producer, cinematographer, editor—those are some of those like really core positions that you want to make sure that you're hiring the right people, and that you're bringing on partners. Not just contractors, but story partners to help you craft these films.
What documentary has impacted or inspired you the most?
There [are] so many great documentary films out there. I actually have like an ongoing list that I keep for myself, so that I can remember them and go back in reference them.
The first one that comes to mind is The Cove. It's the documentary… about dolphins and the guy who trained Flipper [on] that old TV show, and the dolphin crisis and how they're being exploited. This guy went on a journey to try to rescue dolphins. The reason that one stands out to me is because that was very early in my career, and it was the first documentary I ever watched that why I felt like I was watching a scripted feature film. I didn't know documentaries could be this emotionally engaging prior to watching that film. I only ever associated documentaries with [being] very boring.
[The Cove is] the one that made me say I want to do this. I want to make documentaries. If I can make documentaries like this that, then that's what I want to do. Because it's about real people. It's just as compelling as like a narrative film.
What's up next for you and how can people see your work?
I just finished editing two documentaries: a short dock about 30 minutes long and then a feature length that's about 90 minutes long. I've edited nearly 10 long-form docs like this now. I'd love to keep editing films, but what I really want to do is start directing. I'm trying to move into directing my own documentary films and so I have one in mind that I'm trying to get off the ground. I'm just waiting for all the pieces to to come together. I feel like I'm at that point where I have a lot of experience and I'm ready to try to make my own thing. But I still want to keep partnering with all my friends and other great filmmakers to to help them make their films as well. And people can see my work at Kennymiraclefilms.com
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