14

Letting It All Hang Out

 

What You’ll Learn_________________________

Whenever someone says, “Picture this,” I want you to picture this: a news story told with nothing but pictures. No words, no interviews, just video. Video good enough, illustrative enough, to tell the story without a script. Video that needs no explanation. Or, for radio, the same thing but with sound—sound from the scene of the story that requires no elaboration.

Such opportunities are few and far between. Video of people sunning themselves can easily enough communicate to viewers that today was a beautiful day as video of people under umbrellas conveys a different story. But even excellent video of a fire, or a political demonstration, or a plane crash, which might seem to stand on its own and need no amplification, doesn’t answer all the questions that come up.

For example, a colleague who worked for a TV station in Chicago once was casually shooting a small airplane lifting off from a lakeside runway in the city when the plane suddenly flipped upside down and went into a spiral and, within seconds, plunged into Lake Michigan. We needed no explanation of the event itself: a plane took off, turned over, and fell. But what had caused the crash? Was it wind gusts, pilot error, engine failure, maybe a heart attack? Who was at the controls? An experienced pilot or a novice? Someone local, or from out of town? Was anyone else onboard? (Thankfully, no.) Did the pilot have a chance to say anything to the control tower before hitting the water? (Evidently not.) Had he lived or died? (He died.) Although the fundamental fact of the story was obvious to everyone watching, only words could answer the questions we all asked. For that matter, only words could answer an obvious question about the footage itself. How did the cameraman happen to capture the plane crash? (He was testing a brand new camera on his day off.)

So even in the best of circumstances, pictures and/or sound alone will rarely suffice. But—and this is the key to what you’ll learn in this chapter—the best broadcast stories are the ones in which the words support the pictures or sound, instead of the other way around. Every story is different, and some just don’t have the ingredients you need for a good broadcast story. But almost always, you can use video or audio to illustrate something. Almost always, you can let the video and audio make a point that you don’t make with words. In this chapter, you’ll learn how, but I’ll give you a big hint right now. If it’s for TV, don’t write a word—not a single word—without having some notion of what picture will be on the screen when the word is spoken. That’s how the best television news writers work.

This chapter is primarily about television, but many principles apply to the use of audio for radio, too.

The Terms of the Story_________________________

Long Shot Same thing as a “wide shot.”

File Video Video clips from the station’s, the network’s, or someone else’s archives that are used in stories.

How a Rose Tells the Story

Let’s start with a typical city council meeting. Why? Because there’s just about nothing more dull than a typical city council meeting! Not just because the topics run the exhilarating range from sewage to property taxes, but because the pictures run no range at all. Almost always it’s a bunch of council members, sitting side by side at a long curved counter, talking or listening. Whoopie!

But wait! Dull though it may be, maybe there’s still a way to use this video to communicate something. What if the council chamber is filled to overflowing, standing room only? If you show it, you don’t have to say it. What if the council is discussing the issue of unequal pay for female city employees? If the audience is almost all women, that’ll help you drive home that point. What if a member of the council falls asleep during a debate? Well, it might not shed a whole lot of light on the issue being debated, but it sure will be funny, and might in fact illustrate just how dull the debate is. None of these hypothetical scenes is exciting, but at least they’d help you use television to tell your story.

Or at the other extreme, think about a picture that’s truly worth a thousand words. One of the best examples in my memory is from coverage of a terrible tornado in South Dakota. It tore out hundreds of homes and wiped out dozens of lives in its path. But fairly typical of tornadoes, it touched down, then leaped in the air, then touched down elsewhere again. Some structures stood untouched, despite devastation all around them.

So the story began with a rose. A closeup shot of a single rose, poking out of the ground. The opening line was:

The tornado didn’t destroy everything.

Then, as the cameraman began a slow pullout from the closeup of the rose, revealing the scattered bricks and broken lumber of homes that had been destroyed on either side, the narration continued:

Some flowers survived … some homes survived … some people in this otherwise devastated town survived too.

Then, of course, the story went on to describe—in pictures and words—how harmful the tornado had been, and how much of the town had not survived. But that opening shot set the stage. By the time it pulled out to its widest angle, it was a striking symbol of the random nature of the tornado, and the lucky people whose lives and homes weren’t ruined.

And, there was the story of Canadian hero Rick Hansen. He was a paraplegic, paralyzed in a car crash. For several years he sat in his wheelchair and felt sorry for himself. But then he decided to make the best of his new life. He would push himself around the world in his wheelchair, raising money along the way for medical research on spinal cord injuries.

We shot his triumphant departure from his home town of Vancouver—triumphant even at the outset because Hansen had struggled mightily to raise the funds and assemble the team he’d need to support him for the two years and two months his venture would take. We also arranged to have cameras record his chairbound trek along different difficult portions of the trip, through exotic parts of Yugoslavia, Israel, China, Australia. Finally, we hooked back up with Hansen during the last few days of his worthy two-year-plus mission, westward through the Rockies in British Columbia, his last leg to Vancouver.

The crowds along that final couple of hundred remote miles of the route—with not a single good sized town between him and his destination—were as thick some places as a New York crowd cheering the Yankees in a victory parade. To Canadians, Hansen was every inch a hero. In my mind I likened the scenes to what I’ve read about the ticker tape parades that greeted Charles Lindbergh after he became the first man to fly alone across the Atlantic. Every inch a hero.

But those dramatic, cheering, proud, adoring crowds didn’t make the story special. The shots of Rick Hansen did. The long shots, taken across a canyon from the end of a curve in the road as he approached the beginning, highlighting the small scale of one man laboriously pushing his wheelchair up the highway against the massive backdrop of the Canadian Rockies. That’s how the story started, with the long shots running long, to let it all sink in:

It took Ferdinand Magellan three years to go ’round this earth, Yuri Gagarin—the first to do it in space—89 minutes. But no one, ever, has had to provide all his own propulsion, with the sheer force of his arms. No one, ’til Rick Hansen.

Then, this sound bite with Rick (which was moving, in more ways than one):

For me it’s been the struggle of my life. There will never be anything after this as difficult …

Then the closeups, taken from the tailgate of a station wagon about twenty feet ahead of Hansen, showing how much stronger he was than when he had started, but with his chest still heaving, his breath still short, his skin now tanned and cracked by so many months of exposure.

For two years, two months now, he has struggled, pushing himself every inch of 25-thousand miles. 29-year old Rick Hansen, paralyzed by a car crash in his teens, has pushed himself all the way around the circumference of the earth.

You could have turned down the sound and still grasped the soul of the story. No, you might not have known how Rick Hansen ended up in a wheelchair, or why he was completing this round-the-world trip. But you would have understood that right there on your television screen was a man with almost unimaginable tenacity, indomitable determination, and bottomless inspiration. The pictures alone told that part of the story. Nothing in print could come close.

 

 

What’s the Point?

Some stories don’t have self-explanatory visual elements. But when one does, use your video for all it’s worth. Let the video do what words cannot equal. That’s pure television.

When There’s No Rose Left Alive

Sometimes of course, you might be happier writing for a newspaper, because you can’t imagine what to show in the story you’re covering for TV! I don’t mean a story like the South Dakota tornado where, even without the rose, the destruction would have been easy to illustrate. But maybe a story like that typical city council meeting mentioned earlier, without a standing-room-only crowd, an all-woman crowd, or a sleeping councilman.

Creative writing helps, of course. Not fancy, not fictional, just creative, to connect the viewer to what’s on the screen. For example, a story about funding that was withheld from local sewage treatment plants if they didn’t comply with new federal regulations. We went to the country’s biggest plant, which was in Detroit. (It treated the sewage from the city and 39 suburbs. Who says a reporter’s job isn’t glamorous?) I don’t have to tell you what the primary picture was for the story, do I?

If your only shots are at a sewage treatment plant, then excuse the pun, but there’s no way to clean them up. For that matter, there’s not much chance for variety either. So without much choice, we started our story with an unexciting shot of the plant, and wrote the opening line this way, to connect the viewer:

Most of those that have not complied are like this one, the sewage treatment plant at …

It could have said, “Most of those that have not complied are like the sewage treatment plant at …” But that extra little thought, “like this one,” made a difference. It directly addressed the viewer, and helped pull the viewer into the story.

Another example is an experimental welfare plan in Milwaukee. Not only were there few things to shoot, but we didn’t have much time to shoot them. So the story started with a lot of faces from the county welfare office. Pretty ordinary. But again, a couple of extra words justified them:

When people like these apply for welfare here in Milwaukee…

People “like these.” Contrast that with the slightly shorter, “When people apply for welfare in Milwaukee…” That could be written by anybody, anywhere. Adding “like these” sends the viewer a message: our reporter is there, reporting firsthand, Suddenly the faces, however mundane, are the heart of the story. Suddenly, the extra few words help connect the viewer to the story.

 

 

Creative camerawork helps too. This means, use your imagination—either because you’re shooting the video yourself, or working with whoever is. Get down low to look up at the council members sitting around their podium. Go to the side of the citizen who’s testifying—everyone else will shoot her from the front, whereas the side profile has more inherent interest. Shoot the audience “in compression,” which means we’ll see several faces in an angled side shot, looking closer together than they are. Get behind the council members, to see the meeting as they see it. Maybe take a long shot from outside the opened council chamber doors, to show the whole environment of the meeting, framed by the entryway.

What’s the Point?

Connect with your audience. With pictures or words. Make them feel like they’re right there beside you.

Wallpaper, Instead of a Rose

Unless you want a plain, indifferent, uninviting look in your home, you put something on your walls to cover the raw, unadorned surface: paint, paneling, wallpaper. Television is the same. Unless you want a blank screen, you put something on it to cover every second of a story. When you have sensational video, the screen doesn’t seem big enough! But when you have lousy video, you still have to fill the screen, even if the video doesn’t illustrate much of anything. The word for that video is “wallpaper.”

You’ll see wallpaper in economic stories more than anywhere else, in stories about unemployment rates, consumer confidence, median income. The narration inevitably is about “Americans,” about as generic as you can get. And what video fills the screen? You’ve seen it a hundred times: a crowd shot, often looking down a city sidewalk during rush hour. Wallpaper? Absolutely. Remember, this is where the camera must be particularly creative, because the subject matter isn’t.

Or how about a story on taxes! Now before reading on, stop for a moment and ask yourself, what pictures could you shoot for a story on taxes? Think. Think,

Tough, isn’t it? Well, there are tax forms, and people filling out tax forms, and accountants checking tax forms, and books and booklets on tax law, and items on which we pay taxes, and the people who pay taxes, which means everyone. So you’re not dead in the water, you can find these scenes for your story. But they’re all “wallpaper.”

However, if that’s all you have to work with, work with it. I once did a story about new complications in the federal tax code. The script started this way:

The I-R-S commissioner himself said it, right on the front of your book of instructions: “Completing your return this year could be more difficult.”

That made the visuals simple enough: we’d open on a medium shot of the tax brochure sent to every American household, then go in for a closeup of the commissioner’s printed warning. It was wallpaper, but it served the purpose. And notice the personalized writing: “… the front of your book of instructions.” Something to which every taxpaying viewer could relate. That’s another indispensable trick to connect the viewer to video that is—as you know by now—just wallpaper.

Another economic story full of wallpaper was about American labor unions pricing themselves right out of their workers’ jobs. We went to a Zenith television factory near Chicago, where roughly a quarter of the workers were losing their jobs to cheaper workers overseas. All we really could shoot were the workers, and the televisions they were making (which soon would be made instead in Mexico and Taiwan).

So we started with faces. One face after another on the assembly line. Soon-to-be-unemployed faces. The script read this way:

The faces on the TV assembly line here tell the story: American faces, all members of an American labor union, all earning comfortable American wages… which just can’t compete with lower pay scales overseas,

Once again, wallpaper. But the script justified it, and helped viewers relate to the kinds of people the story was about.

What’s the Point?

Unless your camera broke and your video library burned (destroying all your file video), you always have something to fill the screen. The challenge is to use it to its best advantage, no matter how dull.

Fight to Avoid a Fight

A viewer doesn’t dedicate part of his attention to what he sees and another part to what he hears. He can’t. You know that because you can’t. So the operative phrase for this short section is, “Don’t let your words fight your pictures.”

This is bad:

VIDEO

Business leaders meeting inside convention hall,

NARRATION

More than a thousand demonstrators shouted in protest outside the convention hall,

This is better:

VIDEO

Business leaders meeting inside convention hall,

NARRATION

While the leaders met in the convention hall, demonstrators outside were shouting in protest,

This is best:

VIDEO

Demonstrators outside convention hall,

NARRATION

More than a thousand demonstrators shouted in protest outside the convention hall,

The principle is obvious. Your words and your pictures should match or, if they can’t (because you don’t have video to show what you’re talking about), your words should be crafted to reflect the video you’re showing (as in the middle example above). What you don’t want is your words fighting your pictures.

Think about that story about sewage plants, used as an example earlier in this chapter. To refresh your memory, the story actually wasn’t as much about sewage plants as it was about federal funds that were withheld from them. But the best (and only) pictures we had were of Detroit’s sewage plant. Therefore the words would have fought the video if the story had started like this:

The federal government will not release the money for a higher level of sewage treatment if…

That’s why, instead, it started like this:

Most of those that have not complied are like this one, the sewage treatment plant at….

One more thing: if you have video of two cars that have collided—one red, one blue—you don’t have to write, “The two cars that collided, one was red, the other blue, were totaled.” We can see it! Likewise, if you are covering a fire and you shoot video of a woman covered with blood and crying uncontrollably, you obviously don’t have to write, “A woman was covered with blood and crying uncontrollably.”

That’s the beauty of television. Whether it’s minor detail or major emotion, pictures can tell at least some of your story. If you write what the pictures already show, you might be letting the words fight the pictures. Don’t.

What’s the Point?

Making sure your words don’t fight your pictures is something print writers don’t have to worry about. Lucky them. You do. Don’t ignore it.

When There’s Better Sound Than Just Words

You’ve just learned about another burden you have that print writers don’t. But you also have learned in this book about some tools that you have and they don’t, to make your story effective, illuminating and memorable. You have read references to it elsewhere in the book, but now you’ll get some solid examples. It’s “Natural Sound,” which we usually just call “NAT SOT.”

I’ve already told you about the stirring video of the man who pushed himself around the world in his wheelchair, Rick Hansen. But you haven’t yet read about the story’s NAT SOT, which was just as important.

The moment we hooked up with Hansen, we attached a wireless microphone to his shirt so we could hear him, not only for our interview (I rode a bicycle alongside for about fifteen minutes, the crew shooting from the tailgate of our rented SUV), but before and after our talk, to capture his huffing and puffing up the last mountain passes of his trek. If those seconds of NAT SOT in the stories didn’t tell the tale of one man’s determination despite his disability, nothing could! In fact, we opened the story (meaning I stopped talking) for NAT SOT several times—to hear Hansen huffing and puffing, to hear crowds along his route cheering as he pushed past, and to hear his exchanges with his support team in a van sometimes rolling just ahead of his wheelchair.

Another story where NAT SOT was critical was about a therapy program, run by a guy named Wayne Michael, an inmate at the State Prison in Stillwater, Minnesota. Three times a week, he got twenty-five maximum security prisoners to sit in a circle for what they called a “game,” but in fact it was a confrontation: twenty-four against one. The purpose of the confrontation was for the twenty-four to force the “one” (who had to sit in the middle of the circle) to admit to the behavior that put him in prison in the first place, to recognize the behavior that made him an outcast, and to force him to confront his own self-destructive defenses. They’d shout at him, accuse him, shame him, badger him.

NARRATION

Wayne Michael, therapist, helping people to handle stress, by facing it,

NAT SOT (from inmates in circle, shouting):

You never been no good, you never done no good, you nothin’ but trash …

then, later:

NARRATION

Then the game moved to Vernon Scott, a murderer, confronted for simply overeating,

NAT SOT (from another inmate):

You are fat, you’re ugly, and you’re always gonna be an outcast ’cause you don’t give a **** about yourself,

(Scott, head in his hands, weeping): No no no no no no no…

The NAT SOT portions of the story told it all. Viewers could feel the embarrassment, the shame, and the conversion. My only job with the narration was to fill in the holes.

Another example of a different kind is a feature story about a traveling ballet company. It was called “Ballet West” and went places in the Rocky Mountains that otherwise never got treated to cultural performances like ballet.

As you’ll see from the script, viewers were never far from the sound of the story. Here’s how it started:

NAT SOT

Swan Lake music (from film about Russian ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev)

NARRATION

When Rudolph Nureyev made his “grand jeté,” his giant leap to America, ballet was strictly for the highbrow. Fewer than a million seats were sold nationwide for professional ballet back then… two thirds of them in New York,

NAT SOT (“uncultivated” man from a TV commercial promoting the touring ballet company) Ballet? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,

As you can see, we started with NAT SOT (over video of Nureyev, then of characters dancing in the ballet commercial) and, after two short sentences, returned to it. Each time, we then continued the music from the NAT SOT “under” the narration that followed, so that it never completely disappeared. The second section of NAT SOT was followed by similar construction, which set the tone of the whole piece:

NARRATION

This is a TV commercial for a Salt Lake City company called “Ballet West”…

NAT SOT (more music from same TV commercial)

NARRATION

Using a man who quite obviously is hardly a highbrow, the commercial makes a point,

NAT SOT (same man now watching contentedly, from commercial)

Ballet West. One performance can make the difference,

After a couple of sentences explaining that the ballet we were showing (and hearing) was being performed in the unlikely town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, the feature continued at the same pace.

NARRATION

Ballet West came, to dance in a high school gym. They had to bring their own floor… and, their own music,

NAT SOT

Music (over shot of reel-to-reel audio tape recorder, from which the music played)

And again, after more narration about touring troupes, intercut with sound bites from delighted Rock Springs residents:

NARRATION

Ballet has finally reached the masses… and the masses, love it,

NAT SOT

Music continues (over shots of Rock Springs residents, intercut with ballet closeups)

At this point, as we faded out the music from the ballet, we faded in music from a ballet class in Rock Springs where little children were learning.

NAT SOT

Music from ballet school

NARRATION

If the past is any guide, then tomorrow’s audiences, like tomorrow’s dancers, will continue to grow,

This was a story about dance. A story about dance should be full of music. It was. Viewers were never far from the sound the people heard in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

What’s the Point?

Each example in this section used NAT SOT to pull the viewer into the story. Anyone watching actually had a sense of what it was like to be at the prison in Minnesota. And in the high school gym in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Microphones and Cameras Where They’re Not Allowed

There is no uniform rule about microphones and cameras in a courtroom. Some judges allow them when both sides in a dispute (criminal or civil) say it’s okay (although the judges usually still have the discretion to keep them out). Some permit them whether participants like it or not. In some courts, a single camera and mike—for the media pool—are allowed, the camera in a fixed position somewhere behind the dock (where the defendant sits), so that the chief partakers in the legal action aren’t recognizable if they don’t turn around. And some (including all federal courts) ban microphones and cameras no matter what!

I am aware of only two exceptions in federal courts. For the trial of Oklahoma City Federal Building bomber Timothy McVeigh, a camera and a microphone were installed to send a closed circuit broadcast to a site in Oklahoma City, so that hundreds of survivors and family victims could witness the proceedings without traveling to Denver, where the trial itself was held. And even more notably, in recognition of the public’s overwhelming interest, the U.S. Supreme Court made an unprecedented exception to the federal courts ban by allowing remote microphones in its chamber during arguments by lawyers for both presidential candidates, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush, after the disputed election of 2000.

Your job? Always fight to get your camera and microphone in the door. Even in federal courts, even when the idea may be summarily shot down. Why? Because arguably, a policy that prohibits cameras and mikes, forcing you to cover a legal proceeding for your station armed only with paper and pencil, discriminates against broadcasters. Reporters with pads and pencils, and even courtroom artists, are almost always included; the only exception is usually in a trial where national security issues may be discussed. Magazines and newspapers can thrive within restrictions like these because paper and pencil are the only tools they really need. TV and radio obviously need more. Our tools are video and audio. Deprived of these tools, we are at a disadvantage, which means our audience is too.

Of course you must be mindful—as judges are—that electronic equipment like cameras and microphones can alter participants’ performances, and thus alter justice. You may not remember it, but the murder trial of former football star O.J. Simpson proved this. Almost everyone involved, including the judge himself, apparently adjusted their demeanor for the camera. Whereas the federal trial of Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of bombing the Oklahoma City Federal Building and killing hundreds inside, was considered a model of proper justice. Cameras and microphones for the general public’s consumption had been prohibited. You don’t want to influence the proceedings of the court, which is a risk you take if you record them electronically. But you don’t want to deprive your audience of a thorough report on those proceedings either. You must walk a fine line.

Personally, I was twice involved in petitions to get our camera and microphone into a prohibited place. Once we went before the Utah Supreme Court. The other time we went to a federal appellate court. Both times—related to a prison interview we’d arranged with convicted double-murderer Gary Gilmore—we lost. But on our audience’s behalf, we tried. You should too.

Two organizations have informative guidelines that pertain to the use of and rules about recording equipment in court. They are the Radio and Television News Directors Association, and the American Bar Association.

What’s the Point?

If you don’t try to get recording equipment into a courtroom because the judge or the rules don’t allow it, you are accepting decisions that put you and your audience at a disadvantage. But if you try and succeed, take every conceivable precaution not to influence the performance of participants, or the outcome.

Exercises to Put the Angels in Your Work________________