Steven Escobar is pretty busy these days, editing both Big Brother and The Amazing Race for CBS this year. Having worked on Amazing Race for four seasons, Steven won an Emmy in 2007 for “Outstanding Picture Editing for Reality Programming,” in recognition of his editing prowess on that show.

Cutting with an Avid Media Composer, hooked up to an Avid Unity shared storage system, loaded with Sony XDCAM standard definition footage, the thing Steven likes best about working on reality shows is: he doesn’t have a script. “We never cut to a script,” he begins. “In fact, it sometimes bothers me that some people think reality shows like ours are pre-scripted, especially with Amazing Race; the race is really a race. It is our job as editors,” he continues, “to figure out how to tell the story the best way we can with the footage we are given. Writers ─ in the conventional sense ─ don’t exist in reality TV.”

In Steven’s mind, The Amazing Race is a show about relationships. “It is a competition, of course,” he says, “but what I am interested in, is what the experience means to the participants.”

The show’s producers ─ overseen by co-executive producer Amy Chacon ─ do screen the footage shot in the field and give him a roadmap of cues outlining when the different teams arrive at various destinations and how they set off for their next goal. “But after that it is just one big puzzle that the editors have to make sense of,” Steven explains. “Since I get between 300 to 500 hours of XDCAM material per episode, there are usually lots of options to work it out.”

With 11 teams in the race ─ each covered by its own camera crew ─ with extra cameras at each departure and arrival location, along with aerial footage, that’s a mind boggling amount of material for the 10 day and six night editors working on The Amazing Race. The show travels all around the world, but naturally Steven is legally restrained from telling us where they are going. Editors, after all, know all the reality behind reality shows.

Although nothing is ever fabricated on The Amazing Race, the cameras don’t always bring back exactly the right footage. Stuff happens in the field; but Steven still needs to move the story forward with his editing skills. “In one episode, a camera went down and I had to fill in with material from other crews,” Steven reveals. “I used generic shots of clues being handed off to a team, and filled in the narrative by stealing audio voice over from another scene. It did not change the truth of the story, but we had to keep the audience filled in.”

That’s one major contribution editors make to reality TV. If a battery dies before something crucial happens, the race’s team can’t ask for a retake. But a successful show like The Amazing Race has an editing team who keeps things moving forward.
“I came from documentaries [and] that’s why I love reality shows,” Steven concludes, “and [I] am convinced the genre will not be going away.”

CONTACTS:

Avid
www.avid.com

Sony
www.sony.com/professional