A publishing company approached me today wanting me to write another book on digital video. This one’s aimed at complete novices. It’s quite short – 20,000 words, but sounds like a good project.
Just to set the record straight – you don’t get rich writing books. I’ve written (or contributed to) 4 so far – this will be my 5th – and I’ve learned that:
1) the advance is generally pretty small because you’re also offered royalties on sales
and
2) the advance is all you get because specialist factual books rarely if ever sell enough to start paying royalties.
So you need to negotiate an advance that will pay for you to write the book.
That’s not to say that writing a book isn’t a good experience – it is – and it can allow you to explore areas that you can’t in the tightly word-controlled world of magazine writing and you can be a little more in-depth, exploring the issues behind whatever it is you’re writing about.
This one looks like it’s going to be basically a set of extended tutorials showing people who are just discovering youtube how they can make their own digital videos, so it’s fun but not too technical. The emphasis will be on being creative not on obeying all the rules of TV.
Anyway – it will give me enough money to pay for the narration on a couple of documentaries – so that’s one problem sorted. I’m just not expecting to retire on it.
More on that as it develops, and eventually turns into a panic…(the deadline is 2 months – which seems do-able right now…
Over the last couple of days I’ve been setting up and rendering animations for my latest documentary. Some of them are looking great – and with the basic edit in place I can begin to see where there are gaps in the visuals and fill them in. it’s great using CG as part of my documentaries – because I never have to worry about how my shot footage is going to stretch – I can always make more in post production!
In addition, I’ve recorded my own voice doing the narration – just for timing and storytelling. It’ll mean I can just slip the professional narrator’s voice in when I’ve finished perfecting the script and getting everything else in place.
Yesterday I finally cracked something I’ve never got right in 3d – blending a 3d ground plane in with a background photo so everything looks right when I pan the camera.
I know – it sounds like a pretty techy thing, but it’s going to be very useful.
If you’re into 3d – the trick is to create a flat disk with a gradient opacity so it fades to transparency at the edges, then map your ground texture onto that and combine it with a long thin panoramic photo applied as a cylindrical environment) – then as long as your camera roughly resembles that used to take the photo, you can move it around and the ground stays in place….
Ok – I promised the 2nd part of my “how to be interviewed for telly” outline today:
How to be interviewed for Telly –
part II Documentary interviews
A documentary interview is very different from a news one. You can expect documentary interviewer’s to have done some research. They ought to know the subject (particularly if they’re a small outfit – in which case they may well be editing the footage themselves – or at least have a big hand in shaping the programme).
Documentaries tend to be 50 minutes long and although there’s a structure and a story to them, there’s the opportunity for you to add more, explore the subject a little, and bring out some interesting detail and side issues.
They’re almost always catering for an audience who don’t know that much about the subject, so they’ll need to cover the basics – and it can seem a bit of a waste to bring in the world expert on relativity just to say “e=mc^2” but doing this gives the programme the weight it needs to delve deeper into the issues.
Catering for an audience of non-experts doesn’t mean you won’t be stretched, though – you’ll need to be able to explain often quite complex things very simply and having a few phrases you’ve worked out before hand can be very helpful (try to get a list of questions ahead of time – but don’t expect the interviewer to stick to them).
Documentaries do like to be able to drop the odd factoid in “the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs was about the size of Manhattan” why does that matter? It gives “colour” it invites comparison (which is always good – letting the audience ‘see’ the subject in terms they’re used to). It also allows the editor to drop in a piece of stock footage of a plane ride over manhattan over your words – thus reducing the “talking heads” quota of the programme, adding some expensive looking action, and getting you off the screen for a few seconds so they can cut out any ums and errs without causing a jump in the picture.
What goes wrong with documentaries between the initial good idea and the screen:
1) Somebody’s gone to a TV company with an idea which has then been mashed, destroyed and dumbed down by a series of TV executives until there’s almost nothing left but a shell decorated by glitter (i.e. it’s a thinly veiled excuse to stage a fight between robot dinosaurs – or an attempt to claim that an area of physics which even its researchers don’t think of as anything but a bit of fun is in fact definitely going to give us time travel within a couple of years).
3) Big productions tend to cost a lot of money, and involve a lot of people. It becomes a troop moving exercise rather than an exploration. The researcher has compiled a set of notes which the writer has skim read and the narrator never sees. The interviewer is briefed by the Producer who knows what story they want to tell, but has lots of other people on his back only one of which is the researcher. By the time the interviewer gets to you the documentary has already been written and all they want from you is to fill in the gaps in the narration. In fact they’d be a lot happier to simply give you a script so even though you’re the expert, you end up being cajoled into trotting out a lot of old-hat stuff which everyone knew anyway because you have effectively had your lines written for you by a comitte of people who know nothing about the subject, and just think it’d be a good idea to make a programme that they think would appeal to a bunch of other people who they’ve never met and don’t have much respect for.
4) Science moves on faster than programme making. In the BBC’s walking with monsters, one major storyline was based on a fossil of a giant spider the size of a human head. Half way through making the programme, news surfaced that somebody had re-examined the fossil and found it to be a different creature entirely. There never was a giant spider. However, the programme had already written its script. The animators were already working on the spider and the backgrounds had already been shot and the programme already had a slot to fill. So much money had gone into it and so much time invested that nobody could stop the BBC machine. The result is that a new species has been created – and as the media copies constantly from other media – it can never now be wiped out.
5) Repetition. A great way to hide a lack of research is to just keep repeating the concept of the programme over and over again in different ways. I just watched a programme about big carnosaus and basically they spent half an hour telling you that they were big and that they ate meat. The narrator would say it, then a scientist would say it, then the narrator would say it slightly differently and they’d get another scientist in to say the same thing then the narrator would wrap up by summarising what had already been said. By this time the viewer is loosing the will to live. You’d think an hour long show would offer more time, but, no! with an hour long show, you’ve got up to four or five ad breaks – and that means you have to summarise everything at the end of each break and tell the audience what’s going to happen after the break. Then you have to start off the next section by telling them what’s happened so far. If you want to, you can make a programme with no actual content at all.
6) Lack of money. A new group of documentary makers is emerging (and I’m one of them). Instead of making the programme for a named TV channel, they decide they’re so interested in the subject that they make it themselves for whatever money they can (quite possible in this age of cheap camera equipment and computer editing) and hope that once it’s finished they can sell it to a TV channel, or a distributor (who will take it to lots of TV channels). These smaller scale programmes (and I’m including those made for smaller satellite and cable channels too) vary widely between those that eventually end up as oscar winning cinema experiences (i.e. supersize me) to those that are fit only for youtube. The problem is, you can’t tell which is which apart from by making a judgement about the person making the show. There’s no money involved in these programmes and that means they can’t do an interview about the hunting tactics of a pterosaur while floating above the Serengeti in a hot air balloon.
7) The bear pit. Documentary – in fact TV in general – means drama and drama means conflict. The best and easiest way to illustrate a subject and really get to grips with it is to get two people who have opposing views and get them to argue. Drama fuels storytelling and storytelling is what it’s all about. This is great – until someone decides there isn’t enough drama in the show and you need to artificially create some. Let me give you an example. I’m going to be making a show about theropods (Meat eating dinosaurs). Now I’ve already found an area of conflict – there are two sets of scientists both studying the movement of tyrannosaurs – one says they moved quickly. The other says they moved slowly. Now, I could edit that as a battle between them, but the truth is that one thinks they went at about 25 mph – and that’s as fast as a man, so it’s pretty speedy. The other thinks they went very slowly considering their size and work it out as about 25 mph. In other words, it’s not a real fight – it’s a question of semantics… so I’ve got to be careful to find the drama that’s there without inventing drama that goes nowhere. It’s a tightrope.
What editors hate:
Searching through a long interview trying to work out what is the most important point someone is trying to make.
Interviewees who won’t commit to their own point of view.
Oh, and don’t bother qualifying your comments with “it’s my view that” or “at least that’s what the evidence seems to suggest” – because the editor will only cut those qualifications out anyway.
You’re being asked to set out your stall and shout “5 oranges for a pound” – not bang on about how you’re not really sure tangerines count as oranges and how it’s really the fact that you bought a job lot of apples that has allowed you to make such a generous offer.
So – what does this leave us with?
Well, a good documentary interviewer will want to hear your excitement for the subject (that’s the difference between a good interviewee and a bad one). They’ll want to tease out the reasons why your subject is interesting and they’ll give you the opportunity to broaden and deepen people’s understanding and ignite their interest.
They can only do that if you’re able to put those points in a simple, clear and succinct way. Scientists are cautious by training and tend to want to qualify everything and be objective and dispassionate.
However, be aware that programme makers have the opposite adgenda – they need drama, conviction and passion. There’s nothing like someone who really cares about what they’re doing and can communicate that excitement. Don’t talk as if you’re talking to a child. Talk as if you are one.
Be dramatic- don’t say “there’s a partially healed lesion on one of the upper vertebrae matching therepod dentition patterns.” Say “it got into a fight with a trex and won”
If people are interested enough by what they see and here, they can get on google when the programme ends. The truth is out there – in a way it never has been before – and if you can ignite people’s interest, they will find it.
Tomorrow – live interviews, and round table discussions…
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