Three Crucial Ethical Situations

1. I believe that since it has become so easy to edit film anyway you like, sometimes an ethical situation regarding truthful editing could come about. I think that it could be very easy for someone to alter an interview by using editing skills because the interview was not really going as planned. For biased reasons someone could switch around words in an interview and make someone look like they have one opinion when they really have another. I think truthful editing is very crucial when creating a documentary. A documentary is supposed to be a representation of the truth and when words and sentences get flip flopped, you are taking away that truth. By not editing your footage truthfully you are putting yourself and your crew in a very dangerous situation. By doing this you can very easily lose the trust and respect from subjects in the past and future as well as your audience who is watching the documentary. I feel that since everyone is biased, the editor could perform this false editing without even realizing they did it. Because of this it is so important you are very cautious when cutting up footage. When the editing of an interview is done you must ask yourself, “Is this the idea that subject was trying to get across.” If it’s not the editor must fix it so that it is. I feel very strongly about this ethical code, and therefore I will always try to follow the standards here that I have set up for myself.

2. When creating a documentary, every person in the crew has a vision of how it’s going to come out and the opinions that it is going to convey. Because of this, I can see an ethical situation that could be tough for a lot of people to deal with. When interviewing subjects you are supposed to be getting the raw truth. No matter what their opinions or beliefs are you are supposed to capture it, edit it, and create a documentary that is completely truthful. Since everyone already has a vision of what they want in the documentary, it could be very easy to convince subjects to act different or give an answer to a question that they don’t exactly believe in. To avoid this ethical concern, the documentary crew should not ever tell a subject what opinion or idea they are hoping to convey. Since most people are very impressionistic when it comes to being on TV, a crew could accidentally convince a person to speak or act differently than they normally would. Even if it means that your documentary is going to have to take a different approach, you must allow your subjects to be completely open and honest about how they feel.

3. Working in a group to get a project done is always tough no matter what. It always seems that one person is always working too hard and another is not working enough. Because of this I feel that sharing the work load evenly is very important especially when working on documentaries. In the upcoming group documentary project, everyone is going to be at a different skill level. This is no excuse for one person to work harder or longer than the next. I believe that jobs should be divided up evenly in accordance to work load. By not having equal work given out, it causes stress to build up within the group that could eventually be noticed in the final project.