Documentary Producers Editing and Proofreading Services

Documentary carries an implicit promise that fiction does not: that what you are watching corresponds to something that happened. Every editorial choice tests that promise — a reconstruction that is not labelled, an interview answer cut to a different question, archive footage standing in for an event it does not show, narration asserting a motive nobody stated. None of these is necessarily dishonest, and all of them become dishonest at a point that is decided in writing, in the script, months before anyone can see the finished film.

We edit what documentary producers and factual production companies produce — treatments and pitch documents, funding and commissioning applications, narration and voiceover scripts, interview question sets and topic guides, paper edits and transcript-based assemblies, shooting scripts and sequence outlines, participant information and consent documentation, contributor release forms and their plain-language explanations, archive and clearance logs, compliance and editorial policy submissions, fact-check documents and source annotation for broadcasters, subtitle and access material, and press notes and festival submission material. Our editors check that narration claims are supported by what is on screen or on the record, and that participant-facing documents are comprehensible to the people signing them.

The narration script is where the promise is kept or quietly broken, because narration can assert what the footage cannot show. A line saying the minister knew is a claim; a line saying the minister was briefed on 4 March, over the footage of the briefing note, is a demonstration. We work on these so every assertion is classified as documented, alleged, inferred or reconstructed, and worded accordingly; so any sequence that compresses a timeline or combines events says so rather than relying on the viewer not noticing; so archive is described in terms of what it actually is when it is standing in for something else; and so nobody's motive is narrated unless they stated it. We pay particular attention to the join between an interview answer and the narration that follows, because that is where an unsupported claim most often enters — the contributor says something careful, and the narration then says the stronger version. Broadcasters' compliance teams look there first, and so do the lawyers acting for anyone criticised.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including unbroadcast material, contributor identities and projects under embargo. We are editors rather than lawyers, compliance advisers or journalists, and we offer no view on the accuracy of any claim or on defamation, clearance or regulatory risk. What we can do is make the script precise about what it is asserting and on what basis.