THE ROLE OF THE EDITOR


TOM DIXON-SPAIN EDITOR


Aftershock: Everest and the Nepal Earthquake Raw TV for Netflix (two episodes)


Liverpool Narcos Blast! Films for Sky Docs (two episodes)


Being Blacker BBC


Katie Price: Harvey and Me Minnow Films for BBC


American Justice Minnow Films for BBC (two episodes)


Life on the Psych Ward Rare Day for Channel 4


Conjoined Twins: An Impossible Decision BBC


Protecting Our Parents BBC (two episodes)


The Year the Town Hall Shrank BBC (one episode)


Ex-teacher Daryna takes calls from informers


there wouldn’t be any front line action, that there was no embedding with the army. So, we needed to find another angle. My feeling when I heard it was that, even if that’s all we‘ve got, that’s quite a good story. It felt like a really good angle.”


“That was all the fuel in the tank I needed,” says Lambert. “There were a couple of times on the shoot when I checked in with him: ‘this feels good, but does it work? I’m not going to bring you a lot of rushes and you say what on earth?’”


As it turned out, this first precinct fizzled. The theme of real people doing extraordinary things stayed, but the intelligence centre became tricky to film.


One door closed, another opened. “We were struggling, and I chanced upon Roman Kostenko. I was meant to be meeting one guy and I don’t know why it was he came to be sitting at my table, but there he was - an MP and commander with the special forces.” After the meeting, Lambert’s high-risk adviser warned, “Olly, this guy is the real deal.” They met again the next day and Kostenko offered to take him to the front line.


146 televisual.com Winter 2022


“We ended up doing two or three weeks on the front line with special forces and that becomes the spine of the film, and we hang everything around it,” says Lambert.


The process for editing involved Lambert sorting through the 200 hours or so of footage and archive and then grouping it into scenes and events, with timelines, before sending it to be translated. The translation took several weeks but used a smart system that allowed all the material to be subtitled. When Dixon-Spain started, he was looking at subtitled rushes.


With Lambert unable to understand Ukrainian, relying on his fixer/producer to translate piece-meal during the shoot, it was Dixon-Spain who had the first complete picture of Lambert’s experience.


TEACHER TURNED SPY


He was the first to see the young teacher talking about her new work - taking phone calls from spies behind enemy lines - and concluding that she couldn’t see herself going back to her old life. “The other thing that struck me,” says Dixon-Spain, “was when she says, ‘I


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