I started out as a drama editor, in television and features, until I became interested in documentaries eight years into my career.

The biggest difference between the genres is psychological. With documentary one accepts the rushes as a limited representation of reality and so constructing a film becomes a creative search for a coherent story, usually driven by a search for the truth. With fiction the process is often dominated by finding solutions to unconvincing performances or unforeseen inadequacies in the writing.

Though most of the basic principles of editing drama are common to documentary, editing dialogue is unique to fiction. In these scenes the criteria is subtle, to create convincing relationships between the protagonists.