Top picture editors are more than great cutters. They’re storytellers with an artful eye who know how to bring characters to life on the screen. They work long hours behind the scenes with tight deadlines, but last year’s Gemini award-winning editors love every minute of it.

‘I wake up in the morning and run to work because I can’t wait to do it some more,’ says Jeff Bessner, who received the trophy for editing in a performing arts program for Year of the Lion, a full-length dance drama for CBC by director Moze Mossanen.

Bessner works primarily as a commercial editor at Toronto post house Third Floor Editing, but makes time for several long-form projects each year. His credits include the feature The Sadness of Sex, directed by Rupert Wainwright, and the award-winning short The Soul Cages, directed by Phillip Barker.

Although Hollywood action flicks and performing arts pieces are unlikely mates, Bessner says editing Terminal Justice for L.A. director Rick King helped him on Year of the Lion.

‘An action picture cuts like a dance picture because action sequences tell a story through big movements,’ he says.

In December, Bessner finished editing his second dance drama with Mossanen – From Time to Time, a one-hour special for CBC.

‘In both films, [Mossanen deals with] emotional experience, so to fathom what someone is feeling without the words, you really have to pick every little take carefully. Every emotion has to be right off the person’s face or movement,’ he says.

For editor George Roulston, it was Wendy Crewson’s lead performance in The Many Trials of One Jane Doe that dictated the piece’s cutting style.

‘With Wendy Crewson, you never have to piece together a performance,’ he says. ‘Normally when you work with an actor, you look for false moments – moments that don’t fit, or where the actor looks like they’re acting. With Wendy you just don’t get that. She seems totally consumed by her character, whatever she does.’

The CBC MOW, directed by Jerry Ciccoritti and coproduced by Indian Grove and Original Pictures, won Roulston the 2003 Gemini for editing in a dramatic program.

Roulston is currently working with director Anne Wheeler on the CBC drama This Is Wonderland. Although he started working on commercials in Montreal, he has been primarily a drama editor since the ’80s, when he edited the CTV cop drama Night Heat for producer Jeff King.

Last summer, Roulston teamed up with Ciccoritti again on the upcoming CTV miniseries Lives of the Saints, produced by Gabriella Martinelli, and says having an established relationship with the director gives him more freedom.

‘On Jane Doe, [Ciccoritti] sort of gave me carte blanche to hack up Karen Walton’s script as best as I felt, and I think she’s forgiven me for it,’ he says, laughing. ‘When you’ve worked with a director a couple of times, you get to know their likes and dislikes and can cut more confidently.’

Deborah Palloway sees a similar advantage in having collaborated with director Shelley Saywell on nine documentaries prior to A Child’s Century of War, the feature doc that won her the 2003 Gemini for editing in a doc program.

A Child’s Century, broadcast on History Television, marked Palloway’s second win and fifth nomination in the category. In 1994, she won for Acts of War, a documentary produced by Michael Maclear about female journalists working in war-torn countries. For Palloway, it was the first of many docs that would focus on war. One of her most difficult films was Rape: A Crime of War, a 1996 National Film Board doc about rape camps in the Bosnian war.

A self-described ’emotional junky,’ Palloway has to be careful not to let emotional subject matter become overwhelming. When she first screens her footage, Palloway says she embraces its emotional impact.

‘Then I pull back, and my challenge is to try to make the viewer feel what I felt the first time I saw that footage,’ she says. ‘When I sit back and watch the finished product, I can let myself feel again, and if I start to get choked up, I know we’ve got it.’

Although Palloway did some drama series work on The Campbells early in her career, it is long-form docs that keep her in the game.

‘With drama, you get handed a marked-up script at the end of the shooting schedule and you cut as per the series style,’ she says. ‘But for me, there’s just so much more involvement in helping to shape a doc.’

Gary Akenhead, senior editor for CBC news magazine show Disclosure, agrees and is involved in the storytelling process from the very beginning. He joined Disclosure almost two years ago with a mandate to help the show redesign its look and editing style. One of his first recommendations was to include the editor in story meetings for every segment.

The first piece he worked on, ‘Ka-boom’, a segment on the Canadian Hockey Association, won him the 2003 Gemini for best editing in an information program or series. At the story meeting for ‘Ka-boom’, Akenhead kindly suggested that host Mark Kelley lace up his skates and head out onto the ice to give viewers a feel for what it would be like to be body-checked, and Kelley came back with the bruises to prove it.

But Akenhead took his blows, too. He was given seven days in a CBC Avid Media Composer suite to turn more than 100 hours of footage into a 13-minute segment.

‘It’s a very compressed timeframe,’ he says. ‘They were still shooting while I was cutting.’

After working for 15 years as a long-form documentary editor, Akenhead welcomed the quicker style of short-form editing at Disclosure.

‘Short-form doc work is in a way more difficult than long-form,’ he says, ‘because there isn’t a second to spare. You can’t be discursive in any way.’

-www.academy.ca