We review and discuss our footage to help shape our story. After months of filming — in sessions, in the community, at theSpace studio, at the Ottawa Public Library — the Memory Witness and Hope team has accumulated a substantial body of raw material. Now comes one of the most critical and least glamorous stages of any documentary project: reviewing the dailies.
What reviewing the dailies means
In professional film and television production, "the dailies" refers to the unedited footage recorded during recent shooting days. Reviewing them is standard practice: the director and editor watch everything that was captured, take notes, flag what works and what doesn't, and begin to see which moments will carry the story forward.
The term has its origins in the era of film cameras, when the previous day's footage was developed overnight and screened the following morning — hence "dailies." The principle translates directly to digital production: before you can make editorial decisions, you need to watch everything you have. All of it. Including the moments where someone looks away from the camera, the false starts, the accidental recordings. Sometimes those are where the most honest material lives.
The MWH team adapted this professional practice to the scale and needs of their project. They gathered to watch 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 telling.
The experience of watching yourself on camera
Watching footage of yourself is rarely comfortable the first time. The version of yourself captured on video is not quite the one you experience from the inside. Your voice sounds different. Your gestures seem unfamiliar. Many people instinctively want to look away.
For participants in MWH, this discomfort had an additional dimension. Speaking on camera about institutional experience — about memories that carry pain, about periods of life that involved powerlessness — and then watching that footage back requires a particular kind of resilience. It asks you to sit with your own testimony as an outside observer.
But this same process can become empowering. Watching yourself speak clearly about something difficult, and recognising that the clarity is there — that the story comes through, that the words landed as intended — is a different experience from the initial discomfort. Over time, the group found that reviewing their footage gave them a stronger sense of authorship over the material. It was no longer just 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 that is already present in the footage, rather than imposing a predetermined structure on it. The footage from the MWH project 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 those pieces connect — what order serves the story, what to include and what to leave out — emerges from careful, attentive 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 felt unclear or unresolved, 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 the participants in control of how their story was being shaped.
By February 2020, the film was taking clearer form. The review sessions had given the group a map of what they had, and what still needed to be captured or clarified before the editing could be completed.