I am not a Ken Burns enthusiast in the way I am with Robert Caro, but I greatly respect his game. Burns is well-known for his decades of work making detailed, insightful, and emotionally resonant documentaries on subjects such as the Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz.

I recently became curious about Burns’ creative process. When you think about Ken Burns you probably think about narrative voice over and pan and scans of old photos. Above all, there’s lots of careful detail, but it’s purposeful; all intended to tell a larger, nuanced story. Somehow meaning emerges from a bunch of facts.

Where does his vision come from, and how does he achieve it? When I reviewed articles and interviews, I observed a four-step process for Burns’ meaning making.

Distill

The first is to distill: sift through all of the stories, artifacts, interviews, and points of reference that matter, pulling out the most relevant parts. Ken Burns believes that not everything can make the cut, nor should it. I really like this on-brand analogy:

“We live in New Hampshire. We make maple syrup here, and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And it's very much like our process of 40- to 50- to 60- to 75-to-1 shooting ratio. So, it's distillation. It's subtraction. It's what doesn't fit. At the same time, you are also not trying to simplify it to the place where it no longer resonates with the complexities that the thing has.”

You’ve got to distill, but to distill you need lots of source material. And it’s not a one-time thing; it’s a process:

“It is like a detective piece, and doesn’t take six or seven years for naught – we are not idly waiting there. We collect 25,000 photographs even though we only use 2,250. We collect hundreds of hours of footage, even though we might use five hours. We go to all the locations to film for days, often in different seasons…”

Not only is the collection continuous, so is the learning:

“It is about marshalling and collecting the material, and not limiting research – too often research is for a fixed primary period,” says Burns, who adds. “We are educating ourselves during the course of it…The biggest thing is that process means everything to us. We are not wedded to the superimposition of preconception. If you never stop researching, then you are corrigible to the end.”

Delegate and Integrate

Second, Burns delegates and integrates. Famously long and intricate, there is no way one person can sort through the material required to make even one Ken Burns film.

Burns knows you’re going to have to work as a team, and you’re going to need to find talent who can execute on the vision. As a New Yorker piece notes:

“In the decades since “The Civil War,” Burns has evolved into an editor-in-chief. After Florentine has committed to a subject, the company sends out proposals to seduce funders. A director starts identifying interview subjects; a writer starts on a script. Geoffrey Ward, who has written the bulk of Burns’s scripts since the mid-eighties, as well as his own books of American history, wrote “The Vietnam War.” Burns sometimes still conducts interviews, although Lynn Novick did eighty-five of the hundred interviews filmed for “The Vietnam War.””

This also results in a reframing of one’s own role:

“In the early years of production on a documentary, Burns gives his opinion on script revisions and interviews.[...]But he does not strive for expertise. “I can’t be in the weeds” of scholarship, he said. He has too little time.”

One has to be careful not to lose the vision, even as many hands make lighter work.

“Consider the production process of The Roosevelts. Burns says the series thanks a “couple of hundred people in the credits” but was essentially “handmade” by a dozen key people.”

Burns is open to team members extending beyond their originally intended roles. Trusted collaborators can help shape the vision, not just execute on it. To his credit Burns has brought in experts for one purpose and then leveraged their talents for another, as with Jazz:

It’s an oddity of the Burns technique that many of his most conspicuous interviewees—including the novelist and historian Shelby Foote, in “The Civil War,” and the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, in “Jazz”—also have an editorial role. They become part of a group of paid historical experts, perhaps two dozen strong, who, during production, meet with the filmmakers, in New York and Walpole, to discuss script drafts and view early edits.

This kind of adaptability is critical to get the most from a wide set of contributors on a sustained, complex enterprise.

Patience

The third theme is patience. Greatness takes time, but frequently there is tension with the understandable desire to finish the job. Burns’ aim is to create something enduring, so this tension hits him with full force. As this piece notes::

“We substitute convenience and speed for process,” cautions Ken Burns. “Everyone wants to have it done and I get it, but what you really want is to keep that scaffolding up long enough that you’re sure the building is gorgeous and will stand by itself. It takes time and you have to do that. Have faith in the process.”

Patience doesn’t mean rest, it means work and refinement. Burns says in an interview:

“My business usually proceeds with a set research period, which is followed by a set writing period, which produces a script, which animates not only the shooting, but the editing. Boom, done. We never stop researching. We never stop writing. And we are out doing interviews before we've done all the research, or before we've done all the writing, so that we can be informed.”

Vision

The last theme is vision: the final cut comes from the top. Back to the New Yorker article:

Burns, warding off potential critics, told me that the way he delegates is “lawful”—it breaks no filmmaking rules. He added, “The one thing I won’t give up is that primacy in the editing room. The films are made there. No amount of rare or never-before-seen archival material, or even great interviews—and they are great—can replace the triage, the decisions.”

A vision, even in rough form, sets a course for all the subsequent distillation, delegation, and integration. Persistence is needed to avoid drifting. It helps if you can find a way to make the vision real for people early. With software, this is often done with a prototype. For Burns, it all begins with a “blind assembly”:

Viewers who have seen the first episode of The Vietnam War will know it starts with an eight-minute opening scene that sets up the series. That scene began life four-and-a-half years earlier as a 28-minute blind assembly—essentially, an audio-only “radio play” of potential narration. Here, Burns shares the steps he went through to evolve that scene in the editing suite from the blind assembly to its taut final cut.

On a documentary feature, a blind assembly is an edit done without visual components. The editor strings together voiceover, interview selects, and “scratch” narration to make the first cohesive ‘look’ at the film. In essence, a blind assembly is akin to creating a radio play, and can be used to assess how well the storytelling is working in its purest, aural form.

Meaning through Process

Facts aren’t meaningful, nor are platitudes. It’s taken nearly fifty years, but I feel that Ken Burns has, lovingly and with care, built a kind of machine for meaning making.

The word “machine” sounds cold, but I don’t mean it that way. For Burns and his team, everything is done with humanity and craft. When I wrote about craft in a previous post, I quoted John Ruskin, who highlighted many of the same themes we just described when he said:

“A ‘flamboyant’ worker, exuberant and excited, is willing to risk losing control over his or her work: machines break down when they lose control, whereas people make discoveries, stumble on happy accidents.”

Control through process, then, is a means for producing work that is truly our own; truly personal.

I’ll leave the last word to Burns:

We're also starved for meaning. Now, the acquisition of knowledge and facts doesn't make meaning. Meaning comes in duration. The work you're proudest of, the relationships you care about, have benefited from your sustained attention.