Deadliest Catch Editing Gaff

Reuters has the story here.

Very interesting and worth reading. The upshot is that Deadliest Catch admitted to climbing a slippery documentary slope when they patched together two dramatic sequences from two separate events. They say there was a wave that hit the Wizard that caused a leak. They had the shot of the vessel leaking but not a shot of the actual wave that caused the leak, so they went and filmed a big wave hitting the Wizard a month later and patched the two shots together.

The show bills itself as a documentary, which means it isn't entitled to take the same kind of liberties a reality show like the Amazing Race can take. Certain shots are allowed in documentaries, like pick-up shots. Re-enactments, staging and any manipulation of programming are considered taboo.

I've always suspected some re-enacting and staging on the show but the producers swear the they are a true documentary program.

There was one time they were changing a propeller, and another time when one boat rescued a crewman who had fallen off another boat. In both of these instances I thought I detected some re-enacting going on.

In the case of the broken propeller, I thought the shot taken underwater of the vessel leaving the dock was staged or a re-enactment.

In the case of the man overboard, I just wasn't sure how the actual lead-in shot, the one where the guy on the other boat was a couple of hundred yards away, and the one(s) with the actual man who fell overboard and was rescued, fit together. It was as if the shot of the guy yarning down the pot pile was a pick-up shot of somebody else. I also thought some of the frantic action on the boat during the rescue was staged. I'm not saying for sure that it was, just that it seemed it to me.

-seabgb