The Art of the "Sightbite": Editor Sara Newens Takes Us through Her Process

In the world of documentary editing, the ability to jump between wildly different storytelling modes is a vital skill, since you're frequently tackling different subjects.

But that's just a day in the life of editor Sara Newens.

On one hand, there is The White House Effect , an all-archival political thriller that sifts through 14,000 unique assets to trace the bipartisan origins (and eventual stall) of climate policy. On the other hand, there is Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore , a deeply personal reclamation of a Hollywood icon’s narrative that subverts traditional biopic tropes to center the Deaf experience.

From the challenge of "sightbiting" ASL to the "thriller-like" tension of political archives, Newens sat down with No Film School to discuss how she structures memory, handles massive scales of footage, and uses the edit to challenge the audience's perspective.

Let's dive in.

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NFS: You’ve worked on both The White House Effectand Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, two documentaries operating in very different spaces. When you began editing Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, what early structural decisions helped define the film, and how did that approach compare to shaping a political story like The White House Effect?

Sara Newens: With Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore , one of the most important early decisions was simply where to begin. Rather than opening in childhood as many biopics do, we wanted to start at the moment the world met her — as the first Deaf actor to win an Oscar in 1987 — essentially mimicking her experience of being thrust into the spotlight at the age of 21. It wasn't just a celebratory milestone; it was a moment loaded with complexity, and starting there allowed the audience to feel both the magnitude of that achievement and the weight of what it means to be “the first.” From that point forward, we could trace the arc of her influence through Hollywood and the Deaf community, folding in earlier memories and cultural context when they felt emotionally necessary rather than obligatory. It helped us avoid a traditional biographical timeline and instead build something that felt reflective and experiential — shaped by memory rather than chronology.

The White House Effect required a fundamentally different approach. While I joined the edit later in the process than my fellow editors Daniel Claridge and Pedro Kos (who also co-directed with Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk), the film demanded a deep examination of a vast historical archive, including 14,000 unique assets. It was essential to first build chronologically, beginning with the drilling of the first commercial oil well in 1859, in order to track humanity's dependence on fossil fuels, follow how climate science developed, and understand what influenced environmental policy across successive White House administrations. Once we identified that one of the most consequential inflection points was during George H.W. Bush's presidency from 1988 to 1992, the spine of the film became clear: those four years at the center, with carefully placed interludes reaching backward and forward in time as a way to better understand what influenced the inaction of a Republican president who previously chose environmental policy as the cornerstone of his campaign to get elected.

NFS: As an editor, how do you think about authorship when working with someone as iconic as Marlee Matlin?

SN : I’ve worked on several biopics, so thinking deeply about authorship is a huge part of the process for me. Ultimately, it’s an opportunity for someone like Marlee or Brooke in Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields to reclaim a narrative that has largely been perpetuated and filtered through the press without their consent or control. So I always like to build sequences with the main in-depth interview as the anchor or backbone of a scene.

With Marlee’s story, what really grounded our approach and took it a step further was the director, Shoshannah Stern's, perspective as a Deaf filmmaker. From our very first meeting, she already had such a creative and bold vision for the film, and I could immediately feel how personally Marlee's journey as an actress and activist landed for her. So it became clear pretty quickly that Marlee's story was a conduit for a much richer, more layered conversation about Deaf culture, community, and identity. And in addition to accessibility, this connection is what inspired her presence as a director on screen. Not only is she there so audiences can see her signing in the same way they'd typically hear an interviewer, but the intentional absence of interpreters' voices, combined with the natural rhythms and textures of ASL, allows the interview to unfold almost like vérité scenes. So there's a palpable intimacy to it that gives Marlee the space to share her story in her own words.

NFS: Can you talk about a sequence in either film that evolved significantly from the early cuts to the final version? What did that process teach you about structure, pacing, or guiding the audience’s understanding?

SN : There's a technique we kept returning to throughout the edit — something we internally called "the flip" — where we'd revisit an earlier moment later in the film. Not to manufacture a twist, but to let Marlee's point of view deepen and complicate events that had long been framed through a hearing perspective.

The 1987 Oscars win is probably the clearest example, since it first plays as a triumphant experience and historic moment in film history. But as we kept cutting and layering in more context, it became obvious that the emotional truth of that moment was far more complicated than the celebration the world saw. Returning to that scene later and reframing it through Marlee's internal experience shifts it into an entirely different moment by centering the fear and conflict that she felt receiving the award from her abuser. So it evolved into an opportunity to challenge the viewer in a way, asking them to sit with the same moment twice and arrive somewhere completely different the second time. And we also loved how that mirrored the way memory often works: circling back to the same experiences, turning them over, trying to find a new meaning or understanding.

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NFS: How do you maintain momentum and emotional tension, whether through personal storytelling or archival and political narrative?

SN : While crafting momentum and tension is more or less the goal in every edit, there's something inherently compelling about looking back at past events through today's lens and taking stock of what has or hasn't changed. I think it's a very human thing to wonder: how the hell did we get here? But finding a structure that can drive that kind of narrative usually comes down to identifying a thesis or guiding principle: what does the audience need to know in this moment to raise the stakes, and how does that point back to the film's driving question?

With Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore , we had interviews, vérité, and archival footage to interrogate the triumphs, the expectations, the forced advocacy, and the deeply personal journey of being "the first." And we wanted to challenge assumptions and deepen understanding of the Deaf community along the way — particularly for audiences who felt they already knew Marlee's story.

The White House Effect felt quite different because there was a deliberate choice from the outset to work exclusively with archival material — no interviews, no narration — and let history tell its own story in a sense. There's an intrinsic drama within the political world that we knew could serve as the main narrative engine, but beyond that, we aimed to investigate how a moment of genuine bipartisan consensus around climate policy fell apart, and what that means for where we are now. The momentum came largely from the accumulation and juxtaposition of various stakeholders in our collective future — politicians, climate scientists, the fossil fuel industry, the American public — which, set against the geopolitical landscape across generations, says so much about what our culture is willing to endure. That accumulation builds into an almost thriller-like tension, where key pieces of archival evidence slowly erase any possibility of meaningful action.

But I think both films share a core sensibility and tension that is rooted in watching people navigate flawed systems, and feeling the cost of that unfold in real time.

NFS: Sound, music, and visual design often play a crucial role in documentary storytelling. Were there specific moments in which these elements helped you clarify complex ideas or heighten emotional impact in ways that the picture alone couldn’t?

SN : One of the most memorable moments that comes to mind was during the sound mix for Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore , when we started refining the soundscape for the scenes where we shift into Marlee's point of view. Shoshannah was very committed to upending the typical screen representation of the Deaf experience, which so often just pulls the sound out entirely in a way that feels vacuous and inauthentic. So building the layers of sound for the dinner scene, where Marlee is surrounded by her hearing family, became a real window into how sound and noise are fundamentally different things. Shoshannah describes sound as “the process where there’s understanding of meaning,” while noise is simply devoid of any such meaning. So our sound designer Bonnie Wild crafted a mix that filters both sound and noise through the unpredictable selectivity of a hearing aid. A legible word surfaces between stretches of gibberish, then a bottle crumples and suddenly it's the loudest thing in the room. The film also received a Dolby grant, which gave us the opportunity to play with directional sound/noise, adding yet another layer to the experience. I also find the audio description to be very powerful for that sequence – one of my favorite descriptors is "words with no shape." And together, all of those elements create an incredibly immersive experience that conveys the isolation many Deaf people feel in spaces dominated by the hearing world. There’s actually an entire Indiewire interview where Shoshannah details this process. Some of the best sound design this year is in a documentary about Marlee Matlin, which I highly recommend reading!

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NFS: Looking back, what was the biggest challenge on both projects?

SN : For me, the biggest challenge is typically what draws me to a project in the first place. I love thinking about ways to push the documentary form into new territory, and no project has felt more exciting in terms of subverting expectations than Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore. Working with a Deaf director to tell the story of an absolute trailblazer meant fully committing to ASL as the film's primary language. As mentioned, Shoshannah knew from the beginning that she didn't want to rely on an interpreter's voice overlaid on the interviews, and instead use creative captioning. So during production, she devised a system where interpreters voiced from a separate room so as not to interfere with the natural ambiance of the moment, creating that vérité-inspired interview style. There was also meticulous attention paid to composition across a four-camera setup to ensure ASL was never cropped out of frame. And then it became my job in the edit room to make sure it remained fully visible and accessible at all times.

And I think what many people don't realize about working with a visual language is how challenging it is to condense soundbites — or "sightbites," as we like to call them — which ruled out any reliance on frankenbiting, since cuts can't be hidden under footage or stills the way they can with audio. So we developed the use of split-screens for moments where visuals could support the scene, allowing the ASL to remain unobstructed and intact. I think that also lends the film an unprecedented verisimilitude — I've truly never made a film without frankenbites before!

As for The White House Effect , the sheer scale of working with 14,000 distinct archival pieces was incredibly daunting and ambitious. It took a team of three editors, three directors, three producers, and a dedicated group of archival producers and researchers, all working in tandem to surface the most compelling narrative from that material. And I've honestly never worked on a film that was more collaborative in terms of discussion and ideating. Many days were spent simply talking, tapping into our collective brain trust, and figuring out how to pack the most meaningful information into 90 minutes without losing the thread. And most importantly, making sure we kept the story in check so as not to editorialize or moralize. The hope was always to remind people that climate policy was — and still can be — a bipartisan issue, and that there are real opportunities in this moment to keep history from continuing to repeat itself.