Our film is taking shape! After months of filming — during sessions, in the community, at theSpace studio, at the Ottawa Public Library — the Memory Witness and Hope team had accumulated a significant volume of raw material. Now came one of the most crucial and least spectacular stages of any documentary project: reviewing the rushes.
What Reviewing the Rushes Means
In professional film and television production, "rushes" refers to unedited footage recorded during recent shooting days. Reviewing them is standard practice: the director and editor watch everything that was captured, take notes, identify what works and what doesn't, and begin to see which moments will move the story forward.
The MTE team adapted this professional practice to the scale and needs of their project. They gathered to watch the footage together — a collective review rather than a solitary editorial process — discussing what they saw, what felt true, and how individual moments connected to the larger story they were building.
The Experience of Watching Yourself on Video
Watching yourself on video is rarely comfortable the first time. The version of yourself captured on screen is not quite the one you perceive from the inside. Your voice sounds different. Your gestures look strange. Many people instinctively want to look away.
For the MTE project participants, this discomfort had an additional dimension. Speaking on camera about an institutional experience — memories carrying pain, periods of life marked by powerlessness — and then watching that footage back requires a particular resilience. It means sitting with your own testimony as an outside observer.
But that same process can become empowering. Watching yourself speak clearly about something difficult, and recognizing that the clarity is there — that the story comes through, that the words arrived as intended — is a very different experience from the initial discomfort. Over time, the group found that reviewing its footage gave it a stronger sense of ownership over the material. It was no longer simply something that had happened in front of a camera. It was something they had made.
Shaping the Narrative
Documentary editing is fundamentally about discovering the story already present in the footage, rather than imposing a predetermined structure. The MTE project footage had captured many things: conversations about memory, demonstrations of media arts techniques, the pop-up event with Ottawa self-advocates, David McKillop's performance, reflections on what hope means. How these elements fit together — what order serves the story, what to include and what to leave out — emerges from careful and sustained viewing.
The group's discussions during the review sessions were part of this editorial work. When several people had a strong reaction to a particular moment, that was information. When a section seemed unclear or unfinished, that was information too. The collective process of making sense of the footage together was itself a form of collaborative documentary practice — one that kept participants at the centre of decisions about how their story was taking shape.
By February 2020, the film had taken on a clearer shape. The review sessions had given the group a map of what they had, and of what still needed to be captured or clarified before editing could be finalized.