For those that don't have the time to watch the video, here's a quick recap.

In most genres and styles of filmmaking, documentary and non-fiction in particular, your characters rarely speak or act in a way that is conducive to creating great drama on screen. In narrative, hopefully this would be resolved on set with the director giving constructive and focused performance notes to the actors. In documentaries, however, you rarely have that type of creative control over the characters. That's where the editor steps in.

The most dramatic and enlightening moments often happen very quickly, which means that if we leave them at their original tempo in our timeline, they probably won't have as much of an impact on the audience as they should. That's where temporal decompression comes into play. Once you've identified the most emotional moments in your scene, you can artificially add time between spoken phrases in order to make every word more impactful. Essentially, you're creating dramatic pauses to amplify each and every word, which gives the audience time to digest and ponder what is being said, automatically giving it more dramatic power.

In the hands-on example from the tutorial above, which comes from Paddy's fantastic online editing course, we see the primary character, a photographer named Anthony Epes, as he describes his experiences in capturing stunning images of cities at dawn. There are two particular emotionally-charged moments in the rough cut that give power to this scene, but both happen quickly, in a matter of seconds. They're not reaching their dramatic potential.

By adding artificial space between each impactful phrase in those particular moments, Paddy is able to draw out the drama and let his selected B-roll add more meaning to each individual phrase. The difference between the original cut and the decompressed version is night and day.

Of course, for this to work properly, you absolutely need something else to cut to so that there aren't odd jump cuts or anything like that. In documentary, this would be accomplished with some B-roll footage that corresponds with (and adds depth to) the drama unfolding in the interview. In narrative filmmaking, on the other hand, you would use cutaways or reaction shots of other characters in the scene in order to mask the cuts.

Regardless of how you choose to use temporal decompression, it's one of the more powerful tricks in the editor's toolkit. If you're interested in learning more of those tricks, as well as an extremely powerful framework for editing, head on over to Inside the Edit and check out the amazing course Paddy has put together.