Editing a short documentary is mostly an exercise in subtraction. You arrive with hours and you leave with minutes, and the minutes are not the best moments — they are the moments that survive next to each other. A shot can be beautiful and still get cut for being too proud to share a sequence.
I cut on rhythm before I cut on content. If the pacing is honest, the meaning tends to arrive on its own. A held shot says patience; a quick cut says urgency; and lying about either is the fastest way to lose a viewer who is, whether they know it or not, counting the beats with you.
You do not find the film in the footage. You find it in the gaps you are finally brave enough to leave.
There is a quiet kinship between an edit and a dataset here too. Both reward the person willing to throw away the material they worked hardest to get. The expensive drone shot, the painstakingly cleaned column — neither earns a place by costing you effort. It earns a place by being necessary.
So I keep a second timeline of everything I removed, label it, and revisit it once. Almost always it confirms the cut. Occasionally it rescues a frame. Either way, the act of looking at what you discarded is how you learn to trust the thing you kept.