The Essential TV Director's Handbook

Peter Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136049613
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Essential TV Director's Handbook is written by an ex-BBC trainer with a great deal of experience in the world of television. It describes step-by-step how to prepare and direct every familiar type of common programme format including interviews, discussions, reportage, music and dramatisations shot either on location or in the multi-camera studio. It is the essential reference handbook for any director confronted by a new programme format or the challenge of an unfamiliar technology. An appendix suggests plans for the most commonly encountered studio situations.



Television culture has been changing fast. Whilst technology races on at a frightening pace programme budgets have been slashed, job descriptions widened as more people have to `multi-skill', and traditional routes of entry have become increasingly difficult to find, with diminishing access to professional training.

Yet the skills and practical knowledge required to make top quality programmes remain unaltered. `The Essential .... Handbook' series offers a range of no nonsense guides to the craft of TV programme making based on tried and tested tricks of the trade. Each book is written in an entertaining and informative way providing only the essential `need to know' information for beginner broadcasting professionals and students alike.

The Essential TV Director's Handbook is written by an ex-BBC trainer with a great deal of experience in the world of television. It describes step-by-step how to prepare and direct every familiar type of common programme format including interviews, discussions, reportage, music and dramatisations shot either on location or in the multi-camera studio. It is the essential reference handbook for any director confronted by a new programme format or the challenge of an unfamiliar technology. An appendix suggests plans for the most commonly encountered studio situations.

Peter Jarvis is a freelance producer and director of thirty years practical experience. He is Director of Television Training International and was for eight years Senior Production Instructor with BBC's Television Training Department.

1

Television grammar

Who needs it?

Every television director does. That's who needs it. Television has a language. It is a language of pictures but also of words and sounds and music. For the most part this language derives from the cinema, which is over a century old. Cinema grammar is understood by practically the whole human race. Many of the conventions of both television and the cinema derive from photography which is nearly 200 years old, and the theatre, which is considerably older than that.

A great deal of the way we perceive the composition and lighting of pictures, and the way we read stories into them, derives from conventions established in Renaissance European painting.

John Grierson, the father of the British documentary, had the job of training directors and cameramen who were Post Office employees, often no more than messenger boys. He began by sending them to the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery just to sit and look at the use of composition and light.

There is quite a tradition to live up to.

Television and film are narrative media. They have to be by their nature. One picture follows another at twenty four or twenty five pictures per second. Each picture adds information to the picture before and anticipates more information in the ones to come. The pace is dictated solely by the director. The reader of printed material can move at a chosen pace, slow down, read a sentence twice, skip the boring bits, refer to the footnotes, flick from script to illustrations and back again or have two publications open at once. Maybe a new generation of computer programs and cable technology will make possible this sort of intelligent random access multiple choice viewing on the television screen. But not yet.

The television world which exists now at the closing of the twentieth century, and which the readers of this book will be inhabiting for a long time to come, remains a linear narrative medium. Television producers and directors may even be heirs to the oldest profession of all, as old as the other claimant to the title. They are the storytellers and entertainers of the tribe. The first priority of storytellers and entertainers is to excite as well as communicate with their audience.

There is no point in trying to tell a story and then wilfully use a language which the audience cannot understand or a delivery which bores it into a stupor.

Television grammar is a true Esperanto. The same soap operas are comprehensible to audiences on every continent whether dubbed or undubbed, subtitled or signed manually for the impaired of hearing.

Languages do not stand still. They evolve, pick up new idioms, drop old forms and adopt new ones. Different social groups and generations may talk slightly differently to each other. There are regional differences. But the bare bones of the language, the grammar which makes communication possible at all, changes slowly or hardly at all.

Broadcast television is a popular medium. It is expensive to make and by the cruel dictates of accountancy needs to attract maximum possible viewing figures. Blockbuster costume dramas and minority series about basket weaving or Icelandic sagas share the same problem of being accessible to their widest audiences.

The content may be as populist or esoteric as you like. The images and sounds will not convey the message without a familiar language with a comprehensible grammar. Grammar can be acquired by a process of instruction and correction or through experience and emulation; generally a mixture of the two.

This assertion can be disputed. There are three arguments in favour of throwing away the whole idea of the grammar of television as an out-of-date irrelevance; rather as schools stopped teaching Latin. They run:

1 There is a youth (yoof) generation brought up on the anarchic visual language of pop videos and commercials, who routinely channel-zap between ever-increasing numbers of transmissions and whose recreation is computer games. This audience exists bombarded by a cacophony of amplified music and a blitz of images which it is capable of deciphering without help from anyone else. Its attention span may be measured in seconds, not hours or minutes. Every image ought to be novel, spectacular and arresting. There is no time or need for pedantic rules.

2 The mystery has gone out of the craft. Everyone with a few hundred pounds can buy technical equipment almost as good as that used by broadcasters. Families have domestic video equipment as well as snapshot cameras. They are happy with what was once unacceptably amateur. Why complain about unsteady pans and zooms, jump cuts in vision or weird camera angles? Nobody is confused any more. Everyone understands the technology and how to operate it and the professionally trained elite are becoming irrelevant anachronisms. Television is thoroughly democratic at last.

3 Television grammar is just a boring way for the old guard to stifle originality and creativity. Television is an art form. Artists have proved repeatedly that they can tear up the rule books and create new languages from scratch. Learning about yesterday's television grammar is an academic irrelevance holding the medium from its artistic potential.

There are no absolute answers to these assertions. This book does though hope to demolish them. All three propositions come to much the same thing. From now on with broadcast television, anything goes. This is all one with the fashionable school of English criticism that sees Shakespeare and Mills and Boon romances as having equal value. It just depends on what the reader feels like at the time.

My rebuttal is as follows:

1 Youth generations are short lived and spend a great deal of time reinventing the wheel. Each new generation thinks that it is unique and more innovative than every one before. Each in turn becomes exasperated by the callow pretensions of the next cohort treading at its heels. The young are always quick to pick up on new technological developments and claim them for their own. They don't have the burden of having to unlearn old habits. An effortless familiarity with computers is an obvious generation difference of the present era.

There is a desperation about the courting of successive yoof generations by television companies. The main proponents have tended to be middle-aged ladies and gentlemen in unsuitable clothes. This is nothing new, it has been going on ever since the first pop music programmes of the 1950s. St has never fully succeeded. Youth is not yoof. It comprises young coarse fishermen, ballroom dancers, computer freaks, car obsessives, synchronized swimmers, pigeon fanciers and an awful lot of people just worried about passing their exams. The anticipated audience figures never quite materialize. Most young people from their early teens to their early twenties have got better, more amusing and important things to do than be condescended to by television producers.

Genuine youth styles appear unannounced leaving broadcasters behind with yesterday's fads. Making presenters imitate an inarticulate mumble, use the latest slang (nothing dates faster), having every camera shot at a whacky angle and covering edits with explosive video effects and crashing bars of rock music does not create an innovative style. It insults its target audience.

There has been a dynamic input from pop music videos. Directors have been able to experiment with all manner of new techniques. They have been a cradle of innovation for digital video effects. They have introduced computer imagery to mainstream television grammar. Remember though the reason why pop music directors have such licence is because most videos are all form and very little substance: ‘All sound and fury signifying nothing’, to quote an earlier author, or, as more popularly expressed, ‘nice video, pity about the song’.

The biggest yoof audience-pullers in fact seem to be mainstream programmes like soap operas which follow the narrative grammar and dramatic conventions meticulously. Everyone has to grow up eventually. Except perhaps the people who make yoof programmes.

2 The home video argument has proved very attractive to cost-conscious programme executives. Access to good amateur equipment has given rise to an innovative and often very revealing ‘video diary’ format. It can open options to travel programmes which get holidaymakers to shoot their own videos so saving a fortune in travel and accommodation for researchers and camera crews. Technical standards used to be a bar to transmission of amateur stuff on broadcast channels but this is decreasingly so.

There are drama directors who wilfully imitate the style of the home video under the impression that this imparts a sort of specious integrity to the work. They keep their cameras constantly ducking and diving, panning and zooming. What this does to the viewer has been described by one distinguished reviewer as feeling like being on a switchback ride, clutching the sides of the armchair whilst the cameraman behaves like an alcoholic bungee jumper.

The difference between a typical home video and a professionally directed story remains profound even if sometimes it can be a breath of fresh air to watch an inspired though technically primitive item. The main distinguishing feature of home videos is that they are by their nature self-indulgent. They do not aspire to communicate any message or grip an otherwise disinterested audience. Most are probably watched once or twice only. Most are excruciatingly tedious to anyone apart from the perpetrators and their immediate circle. Audience figures consistently infer that the majority of viewers will always opt for a well-crafted and grammatically sound piece of work. Doubters need only to look where the real money is found, in cinema feature films, popular television drama and live action commercials. They follow the universal grammatical rules and conventions.

3 Film and video have attracted the attention of creative individuals from their earliest days. The surrealists of the 1920s and the video artists of today share a fascination with manipulating moving images. The real explosion in innovation has been in digital effects and graphics. There has always been an important minority art cinema. Broadcast television has tended to remain conservative, as has most of commercial cinema. The advent of hundreds of cable and satellite channels may change all this. There may become available facilities for the broadcast of purely experimental work to minuscule audiences of aficionados. This book does not dismiss the abstract and the innovative, or denigrate those who would develop television as a fine art form. It is simply written with those in mind who will accept that directing broadcast television involves knowing a set of basic practical crafts based on tried and tested skills.

It is worth pointing out to sceptics that the work of some of the most innovative British directors of recent years, like Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman, observe the conventions of traditional grammar in their picture composition, lighting and editing. They too are in the business of telling stories.

Breaking the rules, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Television grammar
• 2 It's only an interview
• 3 Interviews and cameras
• 4 Into the studio
• 5 More boring grammar
• 6 Here's one I prepared earlier
• 7 Presenters
• 8 On location
• 9 Writing commentary
• 10 The sound of music
• 11 Performance
• 12 Drama notes
• Appendix Shooting interviews and discussions
• Index