One sentence, or you do not have a film

The test

Before the assembly, write down what the piece is about in one sentence, in plain language, with a verb in it. Not a topic. A claim or a question.

• Topic: "a film about our new clinic". This is a subject heading. Anything can be in it.
• Spine: "a doctor who spent eleven years trying to open a clinic in a district that had none, and what it cost her". Now some material belongs and most does not.

The value is not the sentence. It is that the sentence makes decisions for you. Every clip you are unsure about gets held against it: does this serve the sentence? If not, it goes, however good it is. That single mechanism resolves most of the arguments an edit has with itself.

Why people skip it

Because it feels premature. You have not watched everything, the material might say something you do not expect, and committing early seems like a way to miss the real story.

That instinct is right about timing and wrong about whether. Write the sentence after the logging pass, not before the shoot. And expect to rewrite it — twice, three times, as the material teaches you what it has. A spine you revise four times is doing its job. The failure is never having one, which is how a twelve-minute film about a clinic ends up containing four minutes about the building contractor.

The two shapes a spine can take

A question. "Why do so many of this town's trained nurses leave within two years?" Good for investigation, explanation and anything with a genuine uncertainty in it. The piece is over when the question has been addressed.

A change. "She started with a rented room and no equipment, and this is what happened." Good for profile, process and anything with a before and an after. The piece is over when the change has completed.

If your sentence is neither — if it is "we look at several aspects of X" — you have a list, not a structure, and lists are the hardest thing to hold an audience through.

Testing a spine against the material

Three checks, all quick.

Can you name the moment it turns? Most pieces have a hinge: the thing goes wrong, the answer arrives, the person changes their mind. Find it in your selects. If there is no hinge anywhere in the material, the piece will be flat no matter how it is ordered, and that is worth knowing on day one rather than day five.

Can you say what the viewer knows at the end that they did not at the start? If the honest answer is "nothing, but it was nice to watch", that is a legitimate kind of piece — a mood film, a montage — but it needs to be built like one, and it needs to be short.

Does the material actually support it? This is where spines die. You want the film to be about her determination, and every single answer she gave was about logistics. Either the sentence changes or you go back and interview her again.

The sentence goes on the wall

Literally. Write it at the top of your notes file, in the project description field, on a sticky note on the monitor. You will drift, because the material is seductive and there are three lovely sequences that do not belong to it.

Editors talk about "killing your darlings". The spine is the thing that tells you which ones are darlings.

Where it gets harder

Client work. The client's sentence and yours may differ. Get theirs in writing at the brief stage — the working-editor block deals with this — and if the material will not support it, say so before you start rather than after.

Corporate and marketing pieces. The spine is often "this product solves this problem", which is fine, and the failure mode is a piece that tries to say six things about the product at once. One sentence, one claim.

Vlogs and personal pieces. The spine is easy to skip because the audience already likes the presenter. It still helps, and the difference between a vlog with a spine and one without is the difference between eight minutes that end and eight minutes that stop.

Events — weddings, conferences, performances. The apparent spine is "what happened", which is chronology, not structure. The better sentence usually involves a person: whose day this was, and what the day was like for them.

A worked example

Material: three hours from a two-day shoot at a small printing workshop.

• First attempt: "a film about a printing workshop". Useless; every frame qualifies.
• Second: "how offset printing works". Better — now it is a process film, and the interviews about the owner's father are out.
• Third, after watching: "the last offset press in the district, and the man who will not sell it". Now there is a tension, a hinge and an ending, and the process footage becomes the evidence rather than the subject.

Notice that the third sentence uses less of the material than the first two, and produces a better film. That is the normal direction of travel.

Today

Take the last thing you edited and write its spine in one sentence, honestly, after the fact. Then list the sections that do not serve it. That list is what a spine would have saved you.