Television Field Production and Reporting

A Guide to Visual Storytelling

Fred Shook, John Larson, John DeTarsio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351847988
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

Television Field Production and Reporting provides a comprehensive introduction to the art of video storytelling. Endorsed by the National Press Photographers Association, this book focuses on the many techniques and tools available in today's digital landscape, including how drones and miniaturized technology can enrich the storytelling process. The new edition of Television Field Production and Reporting is an absolute must in this visually oriented, rapidly changing field. At its core, visual storytelling helps transmit information, expose people to one another, and capture and communicate a sense of experience in unforgettable ways. This edition reflects, through practitioners' eyes, how to achieve those goals and excel as a professional, whatever the medium at hand, even as changing technology revises the storyteller's toolkit. This edition emphasizes digital and emerging media, and includes new color photography relevant to contemporary visual storytelling and reporting. It also features important updates regarding digital media law which affect anyone who records and/or disseminates digital media content, whether in private, on television, the web, via social networking sites, or in commercial venues.

The seventh edition of Television Field Production and Reporting stresses the mastery of innovative storytelling practices in video programming as far ranging as electronic press kits, multi-camera production, stylized programs, corporate video, raw documentaries, and real time cinéma vérité.

1 Telling the Visual Story

“It takes a special kind intelligence to tell a story, and from our tribal days to this moment we learn most from stories.”¹

Gerry Spence, trial lawyer and author

Reporters report. Photographers take pictures. Writers write. They attend events. Observe. Tell us what happened. If you subscribe to such conventional wisdom, your work will forever imitate what everyone else is doing. Odd as it may sound, the most powerful visual storytellers often stop reporting and writing, stand back, and serve as producers in helping their story subjects tell the story.

Imagine for a moment that you have been assigned to cover a city council meeting. Other reporters from around town are there; taking notes, recording city council members’ comments, listening to citizens make statements. It’s journalism with a capital J. Except that it isn’t storytelling. That’s because a meeting is never the thing that happened.

Let’s assume city council is deciding whether to apply for federal matching funds to help local minority businesses. Sounds like a clickable or turn-the-page story? How will you make this story interesting? Should you make it interesting? Isn’t it up to you to provide just the facts? Isn’t it your audiences’ job to understand? Not if you wish to have a satisfying career or to compete against other writers, reporters, and storytellers who labor to make their work as interesting, visual, and understandable as possible.

Let’s return to city council, this time with an audience of one in the back of our mind, an approach that the Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark advocates. When he is struggling to make something clear, he says he imagines a conversation with his mother. “If she asked me, ‘What did you learn at city council today?’” he says he would not respond: “The city council agreed by a one-vote margin Friday to apply for federal matching funds to permit them to support a project to aid small minority-owned businesses by giving them lower interest loans.” Instead, he says, “I might be more inclined to say, ‘Well, Ma, minority business people are struggling, and the city council thinks it’s found a way to help them out’.”²

Note how Clark converts the central character from “The city council” to the more powerful and accessible “minority business people”. Now we have real people, non-institutional representatives, who can tell us their story from a people perspective.

If we also tell the story from their viewpoint, or even an observer’s viewpoint, we can show their struggles, the forces that make it difficult to earn a living in the community, how minority business folks tried to survive, and why they’re failing.

We can still report the city council story for it, too, is important. Once audiences understand why the story matters, then we can cover city council and cast the council meeting itself as a story element: the story outcome that remains unknown until council takes its vote. Even then, audiences will want essential details, the vital facts and figures, in palatable doses. “People want to be spoken to,” says Garrison Keillor, noted writer and radio personality. “Ministers who read their sermons inevitably lose the audience in the first two minutes. So sad, so unnecessary.”³

THROUGH STORIES WE SHARE HUMAN EXPERIENCE AND UNDERSTANDING

We sometimes live inside stories. Sometimes they live inside us. Stories help us understand ourselves, and to grow in self-knowledge beyond personal experience. Stories also help us understand what all humans share in common, whether as children, parents, lovers, relatives, workers, senior citizens, or in belonging to similar cultures or religions, in which we embrace common values and codes of conduct. Through voyagers and explorers, past and present, we learn about places we may never visit and people we may never meet. And, ultimately, most humans ponder what it all means and what happens when it ends.

Visual media helps viewers feel they’re part of the action, essentially experiencing the events on-screen (Figure 1.1). The most compelling stories contain a beginning, middle, and unknown ending; the same format in which we experience our own lives and other real-life events. We’ve been telling stories this way since the first hunters gathered at night to relate the day’s happenings: “We began our hunt before sunrise …” leads to the story’s middle where one or more characters struggle against an opposing force to achieve a goal, and on to the ending where the audience learns how things turned out.

Along the way, the best stories address larger issues. From them we gain deeper understandings – perhaps the value of patience and persistence, the futility of hunting in the dark, or what lethal dangers a hunter must confront to feed the clan. The story’s narrative structure commonly begins with someone in pursuit of a difficult goal and follows a narrative timeline through to the ending.

“Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings,” writes author Diane Ackerman. “Learning from our own mishaps isn’t as safe as learning from someone else’s, which helps us decipher the world of intentions … . The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom another’s joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self. (Emphasis added)”⁴ Further understanding of this phenomenon comes from memory expert James McGaugh, neurobiology professor at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. McGaugh notes that when we experience something, positive or negative, our bodies release adrenalin, searing those memories into our brains more strongly.⁵

Figure 1.1 Photography captures tactile impressions of the environment that give viewers a vicarious sense of experience.

Ernie Leyba Photography

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THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VISUAL STORIES AND REPORTS

Visual stories reveal someone’s goals and actions as they unfold sequentially, along a timeline. They use moving images and sound to mimic how viewers experience the world in their personal lives.

Reports commonly emphasize just the facts. They may show people in interviews, walking here and there, and sometimes doing interesting things. In the end and with exceptions, however, they highlight facts and information more than they use video and field audio to help communicate a sense of experience, or to introduce interesting people to viewers. The structure of reports also differs. Reports may even begin with the story’s outcome: “Five mastodon hunters suffered grave injuries early this morning …”

If you equate powerful visual storytelling with mere feature reporting, abandon such prejudices now. Images and sounds are different tools than words on paper or even words spoken aloud. Typically, print informs or reports first to the intellect. Visual stories commonly report first to the heart. Storytelling helps you avoid the institutional. It makes your work unique, something alive and exciting.

HEART, EMOTION, DEMEANOR

“Somehow wisdom is not lodged inside until its truth has been engraved by some moment of humiliation, delight, disappointment, joy or some other firsthand emotion,” observes New York Times’ columnist David Brooks.⁶ In turn, the emotional reactions that viewers experience help them understand the story’s significance. Nearly two centuries ago the poet John Keats noted that “nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced.”⁷

Consider how emotion lends significance to events and situations in your own life: your favorite NFL team just won its eighth consecutive game: you hope today’s injuries won’t derail the team; unemployment is high: you’re afraid you soon may lose your job; you’re excited because you just found a job, received a raise, or won the lottery; you’re annoyed by all the political ads on TV; you feel intimidated by that menacing dog next door; you feel sad and angry because your stock portfolio just lost half its value.

“Facts exist independently, outside people. Seven inches of rain in a night is a fact, so long as you merely see an item about it in the paper,” observed author and scriptwriter Dwight Swain. “Let it wash through your living room and ruin two thousand dollars’ worth of furnishings, and it takes on true meaning and significance for you. For significance, remember, starts within the individual, in feeling.”⁸ Clearly, the same thing happens to viewers when stories or situations elicit honest human emotions. Sometimes, the best writing may occur when your images help viewers feel as if those seven inches of rain are washing through their own living rooms.

During four years as the editor of Life magazine, Thomas Griffith, later a Time columnist, said he learned the different effect of words and pictures. “I concluded that Time was about meaning and Life about feeling, and that both were valid paths to take,” said Griffith. “That gave me a clue to television’s influence. I no longer scorn the way even sophisticated voters, while they might sigh for a sober debate over the issues, get as much from a candidate’s demeanor as they do from his words.”⁹

Note how Griffith differentiated between journalism’s traditional currency—meaning— and what many journalists struggle to eliminate from their reports, e.g. feeling, on grounds that emotion would bias meaning. But whenever audiences don’t know why certain information matters, or finds it dull or too complex, the best approach may be to package the information as a visual story. Stories that sh...