The Netflix documentary Sisters on Track tells the story of the Sheppard sisters, Tai, Rainn and Brooke, who were propelled into the national spotlight in 2016 with their first-time wins at the Junior Olympics while living in a homeless shelter with their single mom. It offers an intimate glimpse into a tight-knit Brooklyn family’s journey to recover from trauma and tragedy.

Sloane Klevin

The film was directed by Corinne van der Borch and Tone Grøttjord-Glenne and shot by DP Derek Howard and van der Borch. They shot mostly on Sony’s a7sii and FS7 using Leica lenses. It was posted at Final Frame in New York City.

Let’s find out more from Union Editorial editor/partner Sloane Klevin, ACE, who served as supervising editor on the film, which she cut along with Andrew Doga.

How early on did you get involved in this film?
I was approached early on, but there wasn’t a sufficient budget to hire me. After the first assembly, Netflix reached out again to see if I could come aboard for eight weeks. Once I started diving into the dailies, I realized there was so much beautiful material shot during the four years of production that wasn’t in the movie. I decided to start over with a very different focus, and I enlisted Andrew Doga to co-edit with me, so we could get an entirely new edit done from four years of verité in just 16 weeks.

How did you work with the directors? How often were they looking at your cut?
We spoke on Zoom and by email regularly and posted our work often. Corinne had very detailed notes about all the dailies in logs and could tell us what shoot days to watch. Tone was in Norway and her notes were sometimes delayed because of the time zone, but she had really strong instincts about logic and brevity. She almost always came up with the radical restructure idea before we could see it. So that was incredibly helpful and she was always sort of one step ahead of us in seeing the big lift or restructure idea.

Because of the tight schedule, and editing on Adobe Premiere, we divided the film in half. Andrew started at the beginning of the story. And I cut the end first and worked backwards to meet him in the middle. We had lots of story discussions on Zoom.

Andrew and I had both moved onto other projects when the film was in finishing sessions, so we missed out on color, conform, graphics sadly. But I was happy that Corinne kept me looped into the entire music scoring process, as that’s one of my absolute favorite parts – the collaboration with a composer. I love the way the score turned out! It’s really something.

Was there a particular scene that were most challenging?
The final Junior Olympics at the climax of the movie was five days of shooting with multiple cameras. It was hard to get the footage all organized and make sense of it. It was difficult to make it move quickly — because it was so near the end of the movie — while still making it emotional and climactic. Andrew, who is more comfortable on Premiere than I am, wound up editing that sequence brilliantly.

Did you do more than edit on this film?
I was supervising editor on the film, so that means I had to sell the directors and Netflix on how to re-edit the movie. Literally sell them on my ideas of how to fix the film. And I was responsible for giving the other editor story direction and assignments too, while editing my own scenes.

Was the edit done during the pandemic? If so, how did that affect the workflow?
Yes, it was. We had a Netflix executive in London, another executive in LA, one director in New York and another in Norway. We also had a couple of story consultants on the film who weighed in on the cuts from time to time. It was tricky keeping everybody’s notes straight. Zoom became very important. As did MediaSilo, which we used to centralize the notes we needed to work through from everyone. Trello was also helpful.

You mentioned that you edited on Premiere?
It came to us on Adobe Premiere instead of Media Composer, which is not the best system for two editors collaborating remotely and sharing sequences. I had never cut on Premiere before, but after a few calls with other Union editors asking a million questions in the beginning, I picked it up. I watched a lot of footage to try to find plot points in the character arcs and emotional moments, and let Andrew do a lot of the sports montages while I mined the footage for emotion and pathos.

Is there a tool within that system that you really liked?
Markers! I love markers. I also think the Premiere color correction tools are great.

How do you manage your time? How do you manage producers’ expectations with reality/what can really be done?
On this one, I worked 16-hour days often to make the schedule. We couldn’t get more than 16 weeks because of the budget, and I didn’t want the film to be bad. I just worked like a maniac. I don’t want to do that on every project.

As such an established and accomplished editor, how do you take criticism?
I think it’s hard to read long pages of notes from executives, but when you talk through the notes with them, you realize they are pointing to things you can definitely improve. I try to figure out what isn’t working for people and how we can fix that, whether the solution comes from them or me, or the director or another member of the team. I think eventually the notes all get done… and they make the film better.

Sometimes it takes a while to understand what the issue is that someone is trying to alert you to. But all notes are valuable! I consider them all carefully and I keep an open mind. Even when I’m overwhelmed by the volume.