Dawn Trotman has been editing BBC television programmes since the 1980s, and has seen constant changes in technology and style.
Click through the following sections to read about her career, and listen to audio of her memories.
This story is part of the Explore Television History resource created as part of the ADAPT project at Royal Holloway, University of London. Interview by Vanessa Jackson. Editing and layout by Nick Hall.
When Dawn Trotman joined the BBC in the early 1980s, the extent of her film editing experience was a handful of tutorials with a feminist film collective in London. She is now a craft editor with credits stretching across three decades, encompassing almost every genre of television.
After studying English and Drama at university, Dawn’s ambition was to be an actor. After appearing in short films produced by the Four Corners theatre group, she became interested in the process of film editing.
Dawn’s career started with a six-week trial in an inauspicious Portakabin next to the BBC’s Pebble Mill studio centre in Birmingham. The work was basic and unpaid.
“I didn’t get paid a penny,” Dawn explained in 2014. “I got sent out there to look at archive film, all 16mm, and just mark up bits for a show that was going to use lots of archive. And I had never really opened a film can. I didn’t know how to open a film can. I had to go up to the edit suites above and ask them how to open, because they were rusty.”
Dawn’s trips to the edit suites enabled her to break into television editing. After asking to work with film editors she was soon offered a contract as an assistant film editor, beginning a lifelong career as a film editor.
In the 1980s, trainee film editors began their careers as the third person in an edit suite: an extra pair of hands to help the editor’s assistant with menial tasks. Dawn worked alongside established editor Christopher Rowlands and his assistant Madeleine.
“I was [Madeleine’s] runner,” Dawn recalled. “You just run about and you make cups of tea, you went and got her spacing; you made sure her chinagraphs would show up; you made sure the editor’s chinagraphs would show up; you made sure the room was spotless, you basically did whatever you were asked to do.”
In exchange for performing these tedious but essential tasks, Madeleine began to train Dawn in the basics of film editing. Some of the tasks were mechanical skills, to be learned with practice. “I already vaguely knew syncing up, but she taught me how to sync up properly. And she taught me also how to break down for an editor into little spools so they could cut.”
Alongside technical skills, Dawn learned that in an edit suite — where tight deadlines and creative minds create endless potential for tension — being able to read a situation and support colleagues was just as important as keeping a trim bin tidy.
Dawn explained: “I think probably the biggest thing Madeleine taught, which is the most important thing for any assistant, is diplomacy, is actually how you function in an edit suite with a director, with the producers, with the editor, knowing when you should be in the room, when you should be out of the room, when you should step in if things get a bit hot, when you should look at the wall and not be there.”
In her first few years at Pebble Mill, Dawn worked with numerous editors. Trainees were not permanently assigned to a single editor. They floated, working with different people, assigned according to operational requirements. Dawn was constantly learning to work in different genres: one moment documentary, the next drama, then a sports magazine. After working with Chris Rowlands on Spyship, she assisted Greg Miller on Now Get Out Of That and Nigel Pardoe-Matthews on Top Sailing.
After eighteen months as a trainee, Dawn was promoted to assistant film editor. On paper, her task was simply to support the editor, ensuring that the right sections of film were available at the right time, and making cuts as decided by the more experienced colleague. But Dawn’s ambition, like most assistant editors, was to ‘act up’, taking the place of her boss and making editing decisions for herself.
Her big break came when a family emergency called a film editor away from his assignment — cutting Bird Of Prey. Dawn was invited to cut an entire episode of the drama series, before showing her rough cut to the series director Don Levy, whose previous credits had included The Avengers. It was a nerve-wracking experience, but one that opened more doors.
“Don was just so wonderful,” Dawn recalled. “So wonderful to meet, you know, and so, so encouraging of me, really. And so from that, I then got acting up on Howards’ Way. That was the first acting up I got. I got on very well with the team. I got on very well with the producer and the director, and did several series of that and then became an editor through that.”
As a fully-fledged film editor, Dawn found herself having to cultivate an entirely new set of relationships: not only with her assistant and her film editor peers, but with directors whose work she was helping bring to the screen. Working on dramas, she soon found that the original vision for a series often had to be scrapped by the time that footage reached the edit suite. One early example — a legal drama — saw Dawn honing her skills of collaboration and negotiation.
“I was on a programme called Kinsey, where it was in law, it was in a law court. And reams, […] of shots were shot, you know. You can’t use all of them, so you’re having to make really critical decisions about the drama. And yes, you’ve got the script, and then very often you’d find, particularly on films, you know, say, a 90 minute film, or 75 minute film, the construction of that film wasn’t correct.
“So you’d assemble it and you’d assemble it as the tramline as the script, and then you’d look at this film and you’d think, that didn’t work. So you’d sit down with the director and you would reconstruct and reshape.”
At the beginning of her career as a film editor, Dawn edited programmes from a range of genres, alternating drama with documentary and current affairs. But she specialised in drama, which was both rewarding and exhausting.
“The hours were very long […] and you would have directors ring you up in the middle of the night going ‘I’ve had an idea’. And it’s 12 o’clock at night and you’re thinking you’ve had an idea and I’ve only just gone to bed. And it was just on you the whole time.”
Eventually, family life imposed an unwelcome change in focus. In a male-dominated industry, during an era that offered little flexibility for working parents, Dawn found the hours and requirements of drama editing incompatible with raising young children.
“It was impossible to do drama because the hours were too long and, you know, and I had to, kind of, get home for my children. So I then went more into factual and I got known as the Countryfile editor, you know. That’s what I got known as. And the idea of even putting you on another show, that seemed, oh, no, Dawn does Countryfile. So it was very, it could be very pigeonholed actually, which is quite restricting, I think, in many respects. It’s a shame really.”
Dawn remained attached to Pebble Mill until the centre closed in 2004, despite opportunities to move to London.
“I opted to stay at Pebble Mill because I knew that I could get to edit quicker but they were just doing fantastic work, just really breaking boundaries and [working on] great drama.
“Because it was a small unit you got to see so much and you got to work with so many different people that it made it a very exciting place and I’m very proud of what we did there and what we achieved there. I think it was quite incredible.
“[All Creatures Great And Small] came down to us cause they were forced down to us and then they never went back, they loved us to bits because we worked as teams, we weren’t fussy, we weren’t pompous, we just got on with it and it was an incredibly exciting place to be actually.”
The transition from physical film cutting to digital non-linear editing was an enormous challenge for a generation of film editors. Many left the profession as broadcasters attempted to impose awkward linear video editing techniques upon them, before non-linear editing software arrived.
Dawn persisted through these transitions, despite the challenges involved in working with equipment which had previously been the preserve of engineering departments. These departments had been even more male-dominated than film editing. Her experience during an early video editing training course left a lasting impression.
She remembered: “I was the only woman on my course and I was with 25 men and I’ve never forgotten him cause I loathed him, he was the tutor and I remember him because he had jangly keys, and that really irritated me, and he always used me as the lowest common denominator, he’d always go ‘Dawn, do you understand this?’.
“After I started to realise this, bearing in mind I’d been editing a long time, moreso than some of the colleagues that were sitting around me, after a while I began to go ‘no, I don’t, could you go over it again please?’ I just used to make him keep going over and over again, it just drove me mad.”
For Dawn the problem with linear video editing lay in its inflexibility. With film, it was possible to make quick alterations simply by cutting, trimming, and re-joining sections of film. Video editing had to be done directly onto tape, and changing a single frame in the middle of an hour-long programme necessitated a time-consuming process of re-making all subsequent edits.
Dawn recalled the frustration of being unable to make minor tweaks to an almost-finished edit. “I found it cumbersome, you’d get to the end of a half hour documentary on it […] then you viewed it and you thought ‘ah, I could tighten it here, tighten it here’, and I know this is going to sound really dreadful but it was like 11 o’clock at night and you thought ‘can I be arsed?’
It was a relief, then, when non-linear editing software — first Lightworks, then Avid — arrived, heralding a return to familiar video editing techniques.
“Lightworks was the first non-linear computerised system I did, I did Dangerfield on that, and that was operated with a Steenbeck controller, I remember it had a big button at the side, it was trying to make you feel like you were still in the film world. I thought that I was really going to hate it. But actually I loved it.”
Like many professional editors, Dawn now works with Avid Media Composer — a fully digital non-linear editing system similar to Adobe Premiere or Apple’s Final Cut. Adjustments and alternative edits can be made faster than ever, but for producers and directors this can create a bewildering array of choices from which to make a final decision.
Dawn explained: “In some respects Avid works incredibly fast, and it also allows you to do several copies, or to do several versions of something, always keep your cuts, so you’ve got versions 1, 2, 3, or edit 1, 2, 3, you can always go back.
“That means it’s very hard sometimes for productions to make decisions. [...] I think in some respects it’s allowed people to be a little bit indecisive.”
The speed of making edits in Avid — one of the software’s main attractions — comes with its own pitfalls. Film and video editing is a creative process, requiring time and imagination. The enforced slowness of physical film cutting created opportunities for creative thinking which the blistering pace of digital editing does not afford.
Dawn contrasts the two approaches: “You’d have to drag the film out and mark it, and you’d cut it, put it together, and that all took time. On an Avid you’ve made that edit in seconds, so the thinking time has changed enormously.
“In some respects as an editor you almost want to build in the thinking time. I would go in and watch my rushes, we used to watch them in the review theatre, so we’d watch them on a big projector and you’d just check to make sure everything was ok. You’d almost sit there in your minds eye cutting the sequence, you’d think ‘oh I’ll put that shot there’, or ‘oh they’ve said that’”
For many television editors that thinking time is now a luxury of the past; in her experience, expectations about the productivity of editors have increased. In the film era, Dawn would have expected to cut about three minutes of drama per day of editing; she can now expect to have to work over three times faster.
On the other hand, she can cut anywhere — even the kitchen table at home — and working from home can restore some of the thinking time and creativity which she misses from the early days.
“[A crew] could be shooting as far away as Malaysia and your files are uploaded to the site and it’s a secure site, you download your rushes, the sound is sent in, the assistant even takes over your Avid at home using various software packages that do that, marries everything up for you, breaks it all down for you while you’re having a cup of tea in your kitchen, you come back and you start editing.
“And it’s blissful! It’s absolutely blissful because you’re almost going back to that time when you had nobody with you, you had no pressure on you and you cut at your own speed and actually it is much more creative.”
