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  "path": "/inside-seized-the-sundance-documentary-about-a-local-paper-and-its-pursuit-of-the-truth",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-20T00:53:02.000Z",
  "site": "https://nofilmschool.com",
  "tags": [
    "Adobe",
    "Seized",
    "Sundance 2026",
    "Sharon liese",
    "Derek boonstra",
    "Adobe premiere",
    "Adobe sponsored",
    "_Premiere_",
    "_Speech-to-Text_",
    "_Frame.io_",
    "_Close Gap_",
    "_Reverse Match Frame_"
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  "textContent": "\n\n\n\nA Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee, the film unpacks the events leading up to the day that forever altered Marion, Kansas, and ignited a national conversation around press freedom and free speech.\n\nEditor Derek Boonstra was tasked with bringing Sharon’s vision to life and turning 18 months of footage – plus troves of archival content – into a succinct, comprehensive story. To catalog and cut this massive amount of content, editing in _Premiere_ was a given, says Boonstra. With hundreds of pages of interview transcripts to organize and hours of footage to sequence, _Speech-to-Text_ became an essential sorting tool that helped Boonstra craft a digestible narrative that remained authentic to the events that took place in this small Kansas town.\n\nRead on for more insight into Boonstra’s work on “Seized.”\n\n**What does it mean to you to show a film at Sundance?**\n\n**Derek Boonstra:** I’ve been fortunate enough to have contributed to six projects that have premiered at Sundance, starting with “The Invisible War” in 2012. Having that very first public screening of a project that you’ve been working on for a year (give or take) happen in front of a packed audience of film lovers in Park City is always a gratifying and humbling moment. Also, to have a film in competition this year during the last hurrah in Utah is extra special. I’m really looking forward to it.\n\n**How do you begin a project/set up your workspace?**\n\n**DB:** Each project has its own demands, but for “Seized,” I was walking into a robust amount of high-quality verité footage that had been shot over the course of 18 months, as well as a moderate amount of archival. I was given a lot of leeway to determine how to set this one up, so I did what I prefer to do, which is to keep it simple.\n\nI edited in Premiere on my home Mac Studio off of a local 48TB hard drive, which we kept backed up/synced in other locations around the country. Alexandra Siambekos, our assistant editor and associate producer, and I worked to organize and catalogue everything into fairly granularly named sync sequences, which was a process that took a couple of weeks, but made maneuvering through the project very fluid throughout the rest of the edit. It was one of the smoothest projects, technically speaking, that I’ve worked on in recent memory.\n\n**Tell us about a favorite scene or moment from this project and why it stands out to you.**\n\n**DB:** This is one of my favorite films I’ve ever worked on. I guess a good non-spoilery answer is that the music for this film was kind of a dream scenario. I convinced the team early in the process that we should try building out the first pass of the movie exclusively using music from the musician Moondog, who was a somewhat underground but also influential composer/street musician, and whose works I thought would align well with our film’s pretty unique tone. It turned out to work so well that we decided to pursue licensing his catalog, which was a success, so most of the music in the film is by Moondog.\n\nThere were some places where there wasn’t a perfect pre-existing Moondog track for a given scene (and he passed away in 1999), so we also worked with composer Nicholas Semrad to fill out the rest of the movie, and he was also a pleasure to work with and very versatile. So, the fact that we got to lean into some interesting music and have fun with it in this documentary is something that I really enjoyed, and I think elevates it overall.\n\n**What Adobe tools did you use on this project, and why did you originally choose them?**\n\n**DB:** I was given my choice of NLE, so I went with Premiere, which is my default. Our main interviewee had about 600 total pages of transcripts by the end of filming, so I got a ton of use out of Premiere’s Speech to Text function on this one. We also used _Frame.io_, and Bill White, our graphics guru, did our graphics in After Effects.\n\n**What were some specific post-production challenges you faced that were unique to your project?**\n\n**DB:** Most of the problems I had on this film were of the “good-to-have” variety. Sharon Liese, our director/producer, had shot a ton of footage before I started, and it was generally of a very high quality, which meant that there were a lot of directions we could have taken the story, and that we really had to be disciplined about story structure and to be willing to cut moments that were compelling in their own right to arrive at the best streamlined 90-minute end product.\n\nThat’s something that happens on every documentary to some degree, but it was next-level on this one. This meant everyone on the creative team had to let go of multiple babies throughout the process. But the collaboration was great, and we all listened to each other and were each willing to see where others’ ideas would lead, and it worked out in the end.\n\n**What’s your favorite Premiere shortcut, and why?**\n\n**DB:** This is like choosing my favorite child a little bit… _Close Gap_ is always a satisfying shortcut when you like doing elevated selects like me. _Reverse Match Frame_ is one that I’m always shocked to find out people don’t have assigned. I like being able to toggle waveforms on and off, especially as the sequences get long. Finally, the way paste attributes work in Premiere is one of the things that keeps it my top NLE.\n\n**Who is your creative inspiration?**\n\n**DB:** I have had the good fortune to work with a lot of talented filmmakers over the past couple of decades, and I generally take something new away from each collaboration. On this project, Liese was operating at a very high level, and I learned a lot just from watching the raw footage and seeing how she managed the flow of filming with radio headsets while in the moment gathering verité footage.\n\nOn the editing front, I will often just happen upon a random movie that will casually blow me away. I watched “Fire of Love” recently (edited by Jocelyne Chaput and Erin Casper), and it was really invigorating to see how they assembled that. It's been a while since it came out, but “Let The Fire Burn,” cut by Nels Bangerter, was another one that really stuck with me.\n\nMy one-time assistant editor turned big league editor, Michael Mahaffie, is always putting things out that I dig these days. There are a lot of other editors I’ve worked with that I really admire and have learned from as well like Sara Newens, Miranda Yousef, Robert Martinez, Doug Blush… so many others.\n\n**What advice do you have for aspiring filmmakers or content creators?**\n\n**DB:** Stay limber and beware of dogma. This industry has been in flux for decades, and it will continue to shift over the coming years. Always be willing to learn new tricks (even if you’re an old dog).",
  "title": "Inside 'Seized,' the Sundance Documentary About a Local Paper and Its Pursuit of the Truth"
}