tell me a story…
In response to my last posting on Video Literacy (March 25, 2009), valid points were raised by both Marc Kusnetz and Martin Fletcher on what is meant by video literacy, exactly.
Fletcher relates a story of how BBC correspondent Martin Bell used to script a story: ‘lay in the pictures and I will narrate to them as I see them’, in effect. This is quite close to my own experience with Charles Kuralt at CBS News. He also spoke to the pictures as they rolled.
This, I think, differentiates ‘story telling’ from ‘script writing’, and it is toward story telling that I am drawn as the more powerful of the two.
This, to respond to Marc Kusnetz, is the danger in all the process of transcriptions and log notes. We take those and we write a script. The script drives a great deal of information into a piece, but it is fundamentally a one-way street: I am delivering information to you. We may find those who construct these in very lyrical ways, but stil it is a form of oration – I deliver, you receive.
This is not story telling. Good story telling is in a sense participatory – between the story teller and the audience. It’s a kind of dialogue.
Let’s look at an example I like to use in the bootcamps:
You are filming in a dog and cat hospital when a little girl comes in cradling her puppy. The dog has been hit by a car.
“Mister, can you save my dog?”
The vet springs into action and miraculously saves the dog’s life before your eyes.
Later that night, you go home to your husband or wife and over the dining room table, you relate the tale of what you just saw.
“You’ll never believe what happened today”, you begin.
“what?” your partner says.
“A little girl came running in with a dog that had been hit by a car…”
“You’re kidding. Oh my God. What happened?”
“Well, I thought the dog was gonna die, but the vet grabs the dog..”
“yes?”
“And puts him on the table and saves his life…”
“Right there?”
“Yep. Right there. Amazing”.
This is story telling. Its how we relate a story to our friends, our family, our children. It’s as old as humanity. Its visuals and sounds and most important, its a kind of dialogue between story teller and listener.
Now, look at how we would do this in ‘writing for broadcast”.
Same scene – you come home to your spouse and sit at the table for dinner.
“Anything interesting happen today honey?”
Sit bolt upright.
“More than 24,000 dogs are hit by cars annually in the greater metropolitan area. Fluffy was one of the lucky few”.
Same story.
Does it work?
Naaah…
Sucks.
Because it isn’t story telling. It’s scripting and reporting.
For my money, as we grapple with video literacy, less reporting and scripting – more storytelling.
Don Hewitt, pictured above, was for many many years the EP for the American news show, 60 Minutes on CBS. It was top rated for decades for a reason. Hewitt used to tell his producers “tell me a story”.
It’s the essence of good journalism.
7 Comments
pencilgod April 02, 2009
Why would I want to write when every one of my pictures are worth a thousand words? 🙂
Michael Rosenblum April 02, 2009
I think you have it backward
The opportunity now is for those who understand pictures (like you) to seize control of both the content and the process.
marc kusnetz April 03, 2009
i’m not sure if this comment is directed at me, pencilgod, or someone else. If it is me, then I’m not sure what you mean by having it backwards. So I am still, at your urging, standing by.
pencilgod April 01, 2009
One of our networks similcasts its TV news on radio. It annoys the hell out of me that you can listen to it without pictures and miss nothing. There is something vitally wrong with that.
But will making an already substandard profession under pressure any better by forcing them to shoot as well as write?
Adam Westbrook March 31, 2009
I think the old rule that must remain is that the pictures lead the story-this is after all a visual medium. I was always trained to tell the story with pictures first and then write your words to fit the pictures.
We could – and probably should – change the style, but I think the purpose of a script should be to contextualise the pictures, tell us the things the pictures don’t show us (and not the things they do show us)
But the biggest crime in traditional TV these days is overscripting. One of the appeals of video journalism (ie Alexandra Garcia’s winning Concentra piece) is the VJ steps back, utters a few clear words and….lets go.
The characters in the film tell the story. For me that is the way forward.
Oh, and I guess we could get all “hey dude here’s what’s happening in the news n shit” but some stories just won’t take it. For example, I will always prefer Michael Buerk’s writing at the start to ‘that’ piece on the Ethiopian famine
“Dawn-and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century”
That too is story telling, surely?
Michael Rosenblum March 31, 2009
Mark, I don’t know why the comments box did not come up, but I have copied your comments here.
Stand by for the response.
m
Michael Rosenblum March 31, 2009
marc kusnetz says:
March 31, 2009 at 12:34 pm (Edit)
This is a response to Michael Rosenblum’s response to me. (His follow-up did not provide a “leave a comment†box.)
At the risk of sounding like a cracked record, I must take issue again. I submit that the comparison Mr. Rosenblum draws between story-telling and script-writing is a red herring. Given what he means by “script-writing†in this example, who in his right mind would want to preserve it? So in this particular calculus, I guess I’m in total agreement!
But enough with the false distinctions; here is the real one: good story-telling versus bad story-telling. This is all that matters, and all that could ever matter. One can, of course, cite an example of bad story-telling, label it script-writing, drive it from the sacred temple of new media, and bask forever more in the warm glow of the digital universe. Alternatively, one can dispense with semantics.
All visual story-telling, whether it’s online, on television, or on some medium now unimaginable to our early 21st century minds, should — as Mr. Rosenblum points out — simulate a listener and a recounter, schmoozing in a comfy living room. But come now, let’s also get real. Let’s acknowledge the ways in which the metaphor breaks down. Let’s point out that the listener doesn’t ACTUALLY talk back to his computer screen or his t-v screen while watching someone else’s story. Let’s point out that it’s the story-teller’s job to anticipate what the listener would ask if the two parties were really sitting side by side, and then adjust the story-telling accordingly.
A story-telling scenario that casts the listener as truly a participant is an unfair scenario. Following that scenario with a lame script-writing scenario compounds the unfairness. It is, I submit, an exercise in sophistry.
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