Powerful filmmaking from a BBC VJ
Peter Wilson was an on-air reporter for The BBC until he took our Video Bootcamp.
He had never touched a camera or an edit before in his life.
He got the very same ‘cut the carrots’ lecture and instruction we are offering here.
Then, he went out and shot, edited and produced the video above.
The Price of Heroin.
We posted it on Youtube and in two years it has gotten more than 700,000 hits.
This is sobering (particularly as my own video lectures have gotten only 1,200), but it says volumes about the power of a great video story.
What makes this work is the characters.
Ostensibly this is about a middle class English girl who is addicted to heroin.
But what it actually is is a story about a mother trying to save her daughter’s life.
There are two characters here -the mother and the daughter.
For the story to work, you have to really care about them.
Note how it is shot. Note how close you get to the both of them, physically. Particluarly the daughter.
In the interviews, the camera is on top of her on the couch. The viewer feels that they are laying on top of her on the couch as well.
The camera attack forces a kind of instant intimacy. If you don’t care about the girl, you don’t care about the daughter.
Note in the part where the phone rings just as the daughter admits to the mother that she has turned to prostitution to support her drug habit.
In the world of conventional television we would unplug the phone or start again. But here, the mother gets up in the middle of this very powerful admission to answer the phone. It tell us far more. It tells us she has heard this story a thousand times.
When the daughter shoots up the heroin in the living room, the camera cuts between the mother, just sitting on the steps, anguished, and the daughter, mixing up the smack.
Powerful stuff.
Very powerful stuff.
Note how the camera lingers on faces.
There is very little ‘action’ that happens here. All that really happens is they go to the clinic.
But it’s the power of your connection to the characters that makes this work so well.
