A great TV drama or doc is like a fine cognac – the mystery is in the assembly. And the four editors who won the last round of Gemini Awards speak to cutters’ oft-unsung contribution to this alchemy that makes up a TV program.

Like cellar masters blending spirits, editors rely less on instruments of measure than on personal taste, juxtaposing moving images to create harmony and sequence.

‘You go back and forth, putting something together. In the end, you go with your gut feeling and then screen the film for unsuspecting victims to see if it works,’ says David New, who earned the Gemini for best editing in a comedy, variety or performing arts program for Rhombus Media’s Ravel’s Brain, directed by Larry Weinstein.

New relied on interviews, music and stock footage to assemble Ravel’s Brain, a musical journey through the life and work of Maurice Ravel, a French composer who struggled with aphasia and apraxia during his last years.

‘You watch interviews and select the pieces that seem interesting – someone speaking excitedly, or emotionally – and use a piece of music to illustrate the scene,’ he adds.

Working from his digital palette, New created the effect of the streaky trailing of blurry images and the leeching of color shots to reflect Ravel’s psychological strain from not being able to communicate.

New has had a long association with Rhombus, so much so that he likely sends his tuxedo out to the dry cleaner every time he is hired by the trophy-laden producer – he has been nominated nine times for a Gemini, eight of those for Rhombus projects. Ravel’s Brain marks his third win.

Dean Soltys, who grabbed a Gemini for the CBC mini Trudeau, reinforces that it’s people who matter in editing, not the equipment.

Soltys and Trudeau director Jerry Ciccoritti used the signature styles of four accomplished 1960s and 1970s directors – Richard Lester, Costa-Gavras, Bernardo Bertolucci and Alan J. Pakula – to recall four key milestones in the former PM’s life and career.

‘During the last hour, we had lots of people talking – big shots, not a lot of cutting,’ Soltys says, referring to Pakula’s style in All the President’s Men.

Typically, Soltys and Ciccoritti played around with the footage on hand to hammer out a meaningful chronology of Trudeau’s life.

‘We had mountains of stuff. There were so many choices. We were never locked into anything, always saying, ‘Let’s try this differently and see how it works,” the editor says.

And throughout, Soltys used diverse media from the CBC archives, such as an old TV logo or graphics from coverage of the October Crisis or the Quebec Referendum.

Serendipity played a role in landing Tharanga Ramanayake the chance to assemble Naked in the House: A Photographic Competition and eventually earn the Gemini for best picture editing in a documentary program or series.

Ramanayake cut his teeth after studying at Sheridan College by doing editing work for Citytv’s FashionTelevision. One of his assignments was a five-minute report of a photo competition in which 11 still photographers shoot the same nude model within tight limits: each gets one roll of film, one camera, one lens and 30 minutes to get the job done.

When Ramanayake heard City producer Jay Levin was doing a 60-minute special on the photo competition, to be shot in an abandoned Stratford, ON railway station, he jumped at the chance to reprise his earlier role.

The young editor used music to meld the different photographers in sequence. ‘I tried to match the people’s personalities with the music underneath the cutting, and sometimes with the photographs they took.’

Ramanayake went against City’s usual fast cutting in favor of straight-ahead doc techniques.

Trust between editor, cameraman and producer figured strongly in Julian Lannaman’s Gemini for best information series editing for TVOntario’s Studio 2 doc Never Coming Back.

Lannaman says he worked closely with producer Wodek Szemberg and cameraman Ken Hillier, a collaboration made all the more poignant as each had been touched personally by the doc’s subject matter – suicide and its effect on friends, family and society in general.

Lannaman says the doc was inspired in part by the suicide in 2000 of a colleague at the educational broadcaster, and by that of the editor’s brother-in-law two years earlier.

‘The family of TVOntario was shocked that a previous producer had taken his life,’ Lannaman recalls, adding that the Studio 2 team worked longer than usual on the project.

Stylistically, Lannaman mixed narrative and non-narrative techniques, including the powerful opening where the camera isolates the words ‘Never Coming Back’ emblazoned as graffiti under the Bloor Street Viaduct, a suicide magnet in Toronto.

-www.academy.ca