Ok – there’s a lot of talk on the documentary filmmaker’s mailinglist doculink and other forums– about how much documentaries actually stand to make.
It’s a huge question and almost completely unanswerable… However, since most of the livelihoods of people on those forums and I’d say a good few credit cards depend on the answer, I thought I’d make a stab at the problem.
Not with an answer, of course, but with a completely non-scientific formula.
The idea is that although the answer to the question “how much can I make selling my documentary” is pretty difficult, it does depend on a few variables which we can start to tie down (and I’m hoping some people will post on the blog or email me (christian@darkin.demon.co.uk) with their experience or their take on how to narrow down any of the variables or refine the formula.
So here goes:
The Grand formula for calculating how much you’ll get for your documentary:
Payback in first year (Pf)= ((100-Pd)/100)*(Nt*Ft*(Pt/100) + No*Fo*(Po/100))-Cd
Total payback = (Pf+Cd)*(100/100-Py))+Pf
Where:
Cd= distributor’s costs and fees – including publicity budgets and other one-off fees
Pd= distributor’s percentage
Nt = Number of targeted countries – i.e. the countries which are most likely to buy your documentary. This depends on your documentary. It could be English speaking countries, countries with an interest in your subject or just those your distributor is going to put most effort into
Ft = the average fee paid by a target country if they buy your doc – I know this varies wildly, but you need an average per purchase per year.
Pt = Percentage of targeted countries – i.e. the percentage likelihood that your doc will sell in a given targeted country in it’s release year. Put crudely you can work that out as 100x(the number of new documentaries accepted by that country divided by the number offered to them).
No = Number of non-targeted countries –i.e. the countries where your documentary might sell, but either you’re not particularly targeting or it doesn’t stand much of a chance. If you’re making a show that’s mainly talking heads, then you’ll stand less of a chance in countries that need to dub the doc. If you’re making a show about US home policy, it’s unlikely to sell in the Ukraine.
Fo = the average fee paid by non target countries
Po = percentage of non-targeted countries you’ll sell to.
Py – percentage of your total sales you expect to make in the first year – i.e. how timely is your documentary and how quickly will the sales fall off? If it’s a nature programme, you might set Py as 20. if it’s a news based one, you might set Py as 90.
Starting to narrow down some of those variables and I’m doing it in UK pounds sterling!:
I’d put Cd at between £500 and £1000
Pd should be about 35%-45%
Nt and No = well, I’m doing science documentaries which aren’t really geographically limited – a documentary on prehistoric sharks should appeal pretty uniformly everywhere in the world. On the other hand, there’s a lot of interview so it’s likely to be primarily English speaking countries. I’m putting in Nt as 10 and No as 30
Pt and Po = well, for my last documentary my distribution company kindly sent back a list of people who’d looked at the tape and those who’ve accepted it. Right now, I’ve got one buyer and 5 rejections – so let’s set Pt at 17%. Let’s make Po half that – 8%.
Ft and Fo = well, I’ve only got one figure to go on and that’s £1900 – but I think the average may be less – so I’m putting £1,000 in.
My doc is about prehistoric animals, so it won’t become dated that quickly. Let’s set Py as 30%
That gives me an estimate of just under £6000
Not good – I’m hoping to be offered some better figures!
any ideas?
Friday, February 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Meeting the publishers - and writing for my Dad
Yesterday I went for a meeting with a publisher who wants me to write a very simple guide to making digital video. The company seems a pretty good one – producing 100 new titles a year (that’s pretty prolific) on all kinds of subjects from travel to lifestyles to natural history.
It was a good meeting. These practical guides are quite new to them, but the first one – on how to do very basic things with your PC (like opening and closing windows and writing word documents) proved increadibly successful, so they’ve branched out into titles like researching family trees, building websites, and of course, Digital Video.
The book will be aimed at the complete novice – and it sounds like many of their readers are older people who have missed the technological revolution. In other words, I’m writing a book aimed at my Dad.
I can see exactly how the book should work and fleshing out the chapters and tutorials was very easy because it’s so clear what the novice needs to know about digital video. I’m also quite passionate about it – I think video is fast turning into a medium which is as natural to some people as writing. I also think that being video literate is soon going to be almost as important as being literate with words – if you can’t post to youtube, or carry on a video skype conversation or communicate your business online visually you’re likely to be left behind.
Strangely, I received a copy of the last book I wrote (or rather updated) this morning (you can see it here, if you’re interested - http://www.amazon.com/New-Digital-Video-Manual-Date/dp/1847320457/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204134233&sr=8-3 )
Anyway – writing a book for my Dad makes me a little nervous because although he’s the target market – he’s also almost impossible to reach with new ideas. He has (and I think it’s fairly common among the older generation) a view that you don’t just start playing with a piece of technology, you read the manual and understand it thoroughly before you start. You have to know what every button does.
So, for example, my Dad won’t use Word because there’s a whole row if icons at the top of the screen which he doesn’t understand. I, on the other hand, use word every day. looking along the row of icons at the top of the screen now – I still don’t understand most of them, but I know that it doesn’t matter. I’m not scared of any of them (except that mirrored P icon which does something very odd to my whole document).
I have to key into a mindset which says “unless I understand everything about how something works, I can’t start messing around with it” and that’s tough.
I guess the only way is to go step by step very slowly through everything and make every tutorial lead to something obviously and instantly useable.
Another new project
I’ve also got the go-ahead to start work on another new venture – a newsletter for one of the main manufacturers of budget video editing software and hardware. It’s going to be a monthly email sent out to subscribers giving them tips and ideas on how to expand their use of the software…. So lots of small but highly focussed articles, and 30-40 word news items. Writing for the web is always an exercise in minimalism (apart from this blog – in which I frequently ramble on for ages!).
As usual, deadlines here are tight. Part I of the newsletter is to be in by the end of the week. The book needs to be finished by the end of April.
It’s all do-able – or appears so now!
Editing
The next stage of editing is nearly done now – with my fake commentary slipped in, all the interviews and cut-aways edited into place, all I need to do now is fine-tune the script, add some music, rescue and balance the sound, correct the colour of the pictures, get the propper narration done and edited in, do the fine edit and add titles and captions.
Actually, looking at it that seems like quite a lot – Oh, I’ve just remembered – I still need to get some footage from NASA – of the unfurling of a solar sail in a test in 2005…
Here's a first (very rough) edit of the opening part of the new docunentary on colonising other worlds... I've used my own voice in place of the professional narrator so I can refine and edit the script, and there's no music. Also, the images and sound aren't balanced and there's a lot of trimming to be done - so don't be too critical yet!
Friday, February 22, 2008
being interviewed for Telly part III – going live
So here’s part III of my set of tips for scientists being interviewed on TV… it’s just a few notes really about the things you may or may not have noticed about the TV industry:
Live interviews
If you’re being asked to appear live, it’s probably going to be on a news programme. The interviewer will have an earpiece in and will be being constantly prompted about what to ask as well as hearing about the producer’s unhappy love life and how badly he needs a sandwich. You won’t have the luxury of an earpiece unless you’re being interviewed on a live link in which case that’s how the interviewer will talk to you.
The reason I mention the earpiece is that through it, the interviewer will be being constantly reminded of the time (in seconds) that the interview has to run. He’ll be being told to interrupt you if you take more than 15 seconds over an answer or if you say anything that isn’t clear and succinct and he’ll be being constantly offered stupid questions to ask you.
The good news is that the reason you’re there is because a story has broken and you’re either at the centre of it or you know enough about the subject to be able to put it in context for an audience who don’t know a thing about it.
Of course, there’s a third possibility – that you’re there because the people who know about the subject are all in meetings about it or appearing on other news stations and you know nothing and just have to fill in as best you can. If that’s the case, you’ll have some idea how reporters feel most of the time.
Ok –so CERN has just managed to create a minature black hole in a particle accelerator experiment. You’re a theoretical physicist (which is not the same as an imaginary physicist) and because everyone at CERN is busy (analysing the results, getting drunk or trying to shut down the black hole before it engulfs the earth) you’ve been brought in to comment live.
You’re going to have heard about the experiment a couple of hours ago, but known it was on the cards for months so you’ll be buzzing with what it means for your field and full of ideas about it. However, once at the studio, you’re going to have to spend most of your interview answering predictable, but dumb questions (i.e. is the black hole going to engulf the earth? – could it be used as a weapon? – what is a black hole anyway?).
Anticipating those questions and answering them quickly not only establishes a base-line of understanding among the viewers, but also gives you a little time to tell the real story – to answer the first “what does this discovery mean?” type question with your line on how our understanding of the world has changed.
A good answer for all concerned starts with “Before we thought that…..”, continues (about 15 seconds later with “Now we know that……” and ends a few seconds after that with “from now on……..”
Because there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of news programming (even among those making news). Everyone thinks that what people want to know is what’s happening right now – right up to the minute. In truth, what people really want is what will happen next. They don’t want yesterdays news. They don’t even want today’s. They want tomorrow’s news and that’s why experts are invited into the studio to comment live on unfolding stories.
Get that right and you’ll be invited back as a “pundit” to comment on stories which are more and more distant from your area of expertise until you find yourself repeating the same witless nonsense you’ve just heard in the report that preceeds your interview back to the interviewee in a slightly different form.
They might even pay you.
Live discussions
A live discussion differs from an interview in that you’re basically being put up against someone with an opposing view with the interviewer chairing it. What’s expected of you is a fight – an easily understood fight in plain English which avoids getting into any detail or going off at a tangent.
The problem here is that you’ll probably already know your opposer – probably even have great respect for them – and you’ll probably also know exactly what their arguments are. The key here is you’re not trying to convince them – you’re trying to make a convincing argument to the viewer.
Live interviews
If you’re being asked to appear live, it’s probably going to be on a news programme. The interviewer will have an earpiece in and will be being constantly prompted about what to ask as well as hearing about the producer’s unhappy love life and how badly he needs a sandwich. You won’t have the luxury of an earpiece unless you’re being interviewed on a live link in which case that’s how the interviewer will talk to you.
The reason I mention the earpiece is that through it, the interviewer will be being constantly reminded of the time (in seconds) that the interview has to run. He’ll be being told to interrupt you if you take more than 15 seconds over an answer or if you say anything that isn’t clear and succinct and he’ll be being constantly offered stupid questions to ask you.
The good news is that the reason you’re there is because a story has broken and you’re either at the centre of it or you know enough about the subject to be able to put it in context for an audience who don’t know a thing about it.
Of course, there’s a third possibility – that you’re there because the people who know about the subject are all in meetings about it or appearing on other news stations and you know nothing and just have to fill in as best you can. If that’s the case, you’ll have some idea how reporters feel most of the time.
Ok –so CERN has just managed to create a minature black hole in a particle accelerator experiment. You’re a theoretical physicist (which is not the same as an imaginary physicist) and because everyone at CERN is busy (analysing the results, getting drunk or trying to shut down the black hole before it engulfs the earth) you’ve been brought in to comment live.
You’re going to have heard about the experiment a couple of hours ago, but known it was on the cards for months so you’ll be buzzing with what it means for your field and full of ideas about it. However, once at the studio, you’re going to have to spend most of your interview answering predictable, but dumb questions (i.e. is the black hole going to engulf the earth? – could it be used as a weapon? – what is a black hole anyway?).
Anticipating those questions and answering them quickly not only establishes a base-line of understanding among the viewers, but also gives you a little time to tell the real story – to answer the first “what does this discovery mean?” type question with your line on how our understanding of the world has changed.
A good answer for all concerned starts with “Before we thought that…..”, continues (about 15 seconds later with “Now we know that……” and ends a few seconds after that with “from now on……..”
Because there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of news programming (even among those making news). Everyone thinks that what people want to know is what’s happening right now – right up to the minute. In truth, what people really want is what will happen next. They don’t want yesterdays news. They don’t even want today’s. They want tomorrow’s news and that’s why experts are invited into the studio to comment live on unfolding stories.
Get that right and you’ll be invited back as a “pundit” to comment on stories which are more and more distant from your area of expertise until you find yourself repeating the same witless nonsense you’ve just heard in the report that preceeds your interview back to the interviewee in a slightly different form.
They might even pay you.
Live discussions
A live discussion differs from an interview in that you’re basically being put up against someone with an opposing view with the interviewer chairing it. What’s expected of you is a fight – an easily understood fight in plain English which avoids getting into any detail or going off at a tangent.
The problem here is that you’ll probably already know your opposer – probably even have great respect for them – and you’ll probably also know exactly what their arguments are. The key here is you’re not trying to convince them – you’re trying to make a convincing argument to the viewer.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
documentary interviews for scientists
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…
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…
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
How to be interviewed for telly – a guide for scientists.
Part I – the news interview
This week there’s a story in the news. The headline basically is “giant dinosaur-eating frog discovered”. The news story seems to be that this is the largest fossil frog ever discovered and that it ate baby dinosaurs.
The truth of the matter is that this frog is no bigger than the biggest frogs alive today and that that nobody’s got any idea what it ate. In addition, the Discovery channel has just launched a programme about re-incarnating dinosaurs using the DNA of chickens.
There’s a recurrent theme about the way science is reported which comes up on one of the paleontology mailing lists I’m on every time such programmes and items appear.
Those who watch knowing the story from the inside get frustrated about lack of accuracy and the media obsession with drama and those who get interviewed get annoyed about being asked to constantly simplify and dumb down everything they say – only to have their comments edited down to nothing or completely misrepresented when the show airs..
Quite right too. There’s a lot of rubbish reporting of science that goes on. However, I’m coming at it from the other side of the camera and I think one positive thing to do is give a few clues to scientists being interviewed for TV.
I hope people both from the science side and the reporting side can add to this and we can build up an advice sheet for prospective interviewees – so here’s my first stab at a scientist’s guide to how to be interviewed for telly:
Right: the idea of the game is to get your message across. You want to communicate he excitement of your subject, the new advances that are being made and maybe you want to push your own take on things and correct a few public myths.
Make no mistake, the interviewer wants that too – and the thing they’re most aware of in doing this is that most people are watching with the remote in their hand and nobody’s going to get anything over once the button gets pushed.
Tip 1: know what type of interview you’re doing and how that changes the game:
News interviews
The interviewer is making a 3 minute piece – two minutes of which will probably be them setting the scene, linking the piece and summing it up. They’ll probably have two (opposing) interviewees and that means each gets 30 seconds if that.
Politicians when faced with this scenario have a very clear strategy. They work out what their line is – boil it down to a 10 second sound byte and say that in response to WHATEVER QUESTION IS ASKED.
They don’t care how badly the answer fits the question because the interviewer is going to be cut out anyway.
The aim is to say what YOU want to say. Say it clearly and succinctly using several different variations of language. The editor will then have to find a way to cut around you. They won’t leave you out because they won’t have time to get another interviewee – and anyway why should they? You’re the expert and your take on the subject is important.
Looked at in a slightly more favourable way, this technique means the producer isn’t fumbling around with his or her weak knowledge of the subject trying to pick out the significant moment of your hour long discourse. After all, they’ve only got a couple of hours to shape the piece before the news airs! Know your line and don’t be afraid to stick to it – and you give the producer something to build their work around.
The news reporter has time against them, so will want to come to you having already written their piece. They’ll want you to simply fill in the blanks – no digression, no interesting side issues – just get to the point.
Unfortunately, they’ll have written their idea of the piece using the info they’ve read in whatever other media broke the story, a press release from whoever’s made the discovery that made this item NEWS and if you’re lucky, the background research they’ve done on wikipedia.
You can be pissed off about this or you can work with it. Working with it means making sure that if it was you that wrote the press release you did it properly (and I’ll try to cover this technique some other time). If you didn’t. it means briefing the journalist when they first phone you.
I know that’s hard to do when you’re not expecting a call from CNN asking you about giant dinosaur eating frogs, but the best thing to do is say “yes” to the interview and then call them back 5 minutes later once you’ve gathered your thoughts.
Interviewers will constantly try to get you to simplify. Think about politicians again: economic policy is complicated, politics is complicated. However, when asked for a news quote, politicians have no choice but to boil down the issues into a single sentence that doesn’t just state the facts, but makes it clear why they hold the view they do and what their perspective is.
It’s a hell of a skill, but don’t think that a sound byte is necessarily a dumbing down of an argument:
“Power to the people” is s a sound byte.
“I have a dream” is a sound byte
“thow shalt not kill” is a sound byte.
"e=mc^2" is a sound byte
Richard Feynman once said that if you can’t explain something simply, then you don’t understand it.
And that’s a sound byte too.
Above all, be realistic about what you can say in half a minute and try if you can to get in early and get the journalist to understand the issues you think are important before they write their piece to camera!
Oh – and if you can be holding something, pointing at something or standing next to something that illustrates the point, do it (as long as it doesn’t have logos, copyrights or trademarks on it)!
‘Tomorrow: part 2 on documentary interviews!
This week there’s a story in the news. The headline basically is “giant dinosaur-eating frog discovered”. The news story seems to be that this is the largest fossil frog ever discovered and that it ate baby dinosaurs.
The truth of the matter is that this frog is no bigger than the biggest frogs alive today and that that nobody’s got any idea what it ate. In addition, the Discovery channel has just launched a programme about re-incarnating dinosaurs using the DNA of chickens.
There’s a recurrent theme about the way science is reported which comes up on one of the paleontology mailing lists I’m on every time such programmes and items appear.
Those who watch knowing the story from the inside get frustrated about lack of accuracy and the media obsession with drama and those who get interviewed get annoyed about being asked to constantly simplify and dumb down everything they say – only to have their comments edited down to nothing or completely misrepresented when the show airs..
Quite right too. There’s a lot of rubbish reporting of science that goes on. However, I’m coming at it from the other side of the camera and I think one positive thing to do is give a few clues to scientists being interviewed for TV.
I hope people both from the science side and the reporting side can add to this and we can build up an advice sheet for prospective interviewees – so here’s my first stab at a scientist’s guide to how to be interviewed for telly:
Right: the idea of the game is to get your message across. You want to communicate he excitement of your subject, the new advances that are being made and maybe you want to push your own take on things and correct a few public myths.
Make no mistake, the interviewer wants that too – and the thing they’re most aware of in doing this is that most people are watching with the remote in their hand and nobody’s going to get anything over once the button gets pushed.
Tip 1: know what type of interview you’re doing and how that changes the game:
News interviews
The interviewer is making a 3 minute piece – two minutes of which will probably be them setting the scene, linking the piece and summing it up. They’ll probably have two (opposing) interviewees and that means each gets 30 seconds if that.
Politicians when faced with this scenario have a very clear strategy. They work out what their line is – boil it down to a 10 second sound byte and say that in response to WHATEVER QUESTION IS ASKED.
They don’t care how badly the answer fits the question because the interviewer is going to be cut out anyway.
The aim is to say what YOU want to say. Say it clearly and succinctly using several different variations of language. The editor will then have to find a way to cut around you. They won’t leave you out because they won’t have time to get another interviewee – and anyway why should they? You’re the expert and your take on the subject is important.
Looked at in a slightly more favourable way, this technique means the producer isn’t fumbling around with his or her weak knowledge of the subject trying to pick out the significant moment of your hour long discourse. After all, they’ve only got a couple of hours to shape the piece before the news airs! Know your line and don’t be afraid to stick to it – and you give the producer something to build their work around.
The news reporter has time against them, so will want to come to you having already written their piece. They’ll want you to simply fill in the blanks – no digression, no interesting side issues – just get to the point.
Unfortunately, they’ll have written their idea of the piece using the info they’ve read in whatever other media broke the story, a press release from whoever’s made the discovery that made this item NEWS and if you’re lucky, the background research they’ve done on wikipedia.
You can be pissed off about this or you can work with it. Working with it means making sure that if it was you that wrote the press release you did it properly (and I’ll try to cover this technique some other time). If you didn’t. it means briefing the journalist when they first phone you.
I know that’s hard to do when you’re not expecting a call from CNN asking you about giant dinosaur eating frogs, but the best thing to do is say “yes” to the interview and then call them back 5 minutes later once you’ve gathered your thoughts.
Interviewers will constantly try to get you to simplify. Think about politicians again: economic policy is complicated, politics is complicated. However, when asked for a news quote, politicians have no choice but to boil down the issues into a single sentence that doesn’t just state the facts, but makes it clear why they hold the view they do and what their perspective is.
It’s a hell of a skill, but don’t think that a sound byte is necessarily a dumbing down of an argument:
“Power to the people” is s a sound byte.
“I have a dream” is a sound byte
“thow shalt not kill” is a sound byte.
"e=mc^2" is a sound byte
Richard Feynman once said that if you can’t explain something simply, then you don’t understand it.
And that’s a sound byte too.
Above all, be realistic about what you can say in half a minute and try if you can to get in early and get the journalist to understand the issues you think are important before they write their piece to camera!
Oh – and if you can be holding something, pointing at something or standing next to something that illustrates the point, do it (as long as it doesn’t have logos, copyrights or trademarks on it)!
‘Tomorrow: part 2 on documentary interviews!
Friday, February 15, 2008
Editing
Editing is progressing apace. Well, it’s not – but it is.
I’m currently going through the production looking for visuals for everything that’s mentioned. I’ve spent about £100 on stock footage from istockphoto, shutterstock and revostock and made a hell of a lot of use of footage from Nasa.
The rest I’m constructing myself in After Effects and 3ds max.
This means I’m spending an awful lot of time flicking through footage sites, trying to download things and experimenting with After Effects layouts. This means my PC is being used right up to its limit: I’ve currently got 10 internet eplorer pages open, 3DS Max, After Effects, Photoshop, Word and Premiere all open and I’m trying to render a landscape in Mojoworld at the same time.
Everything is painfully slow!
Anyway, I’ve found a couple of useful tips for making stills into moving images. Instead of just animating a virtual camera over a landscape panorama still, I’ve discovered that if you add a sheer effect to it and animate that (as long as the pic is high resolution and the right kind of shot) you can get a great effect almost as though it’s a track.
Also, the vanishing point tool in Photoshop can allow you to bring a still to life if you’re really careful with it and combine it with After Effects (although I’ve not done this successfully yet – I’ll post a clip when I do!
I’m basically just gathering clips right now and plonking them on the Timeline. Next week, I should be able tobring them all together and discover whether they actually work.
I’ve got a feeling right now that I’m getting clips illustrating phrases – because I’m using stock footage – and not sequences telling a story. It’ll require some careful editing, but this is a big subject (space exploration) so I can’t go and get every shot myself….
I just hope my animations will tie it all together and give it continuity.
Of course I am deliberately looking for pictures that illustrate individual statements right now so that could well be why I’m getting that feelling…..
Would be good to get somebody elses eye on this….
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
scripting
Scripting
I’ve spent the last two days going through the documentary scripting it. It’s a hard job because I’ve got to string together the talking heads into some kind of story.
In doing the rough edit I’ve cut out all the waffle, and ordered the clips, dropping in a few cut-aways. Where I think narration is needed, I’ve inserted a simple text screen to give myself a visual cue as I cut and to make sure the doc is roughly the right length.
Going through and scripting is a slow and often painful job, and it’s not finished yet. This rough script I’ll record (using my own voice as a stand-in for the professional narrator) and drop in, then as I work towards a fine edit, I’ll refine the script.
I did write a preliminary script a couple of months ago to give the documentary some shape and guide me as I did the interviews. However, I’ve barely looked at it while writing this version, so I’m not really sure if I wasted my time doing it before.
I suppose the preliminary script did help to shape the production in my mind, but I could probably have got away with doing that in a less formal fashion. Having said that, when I look back, the original script (because it was written fast and without the restriction of having to fit it around people’s actual quotes) contains a lot of useful ideas and powerful quotes.
Perhaps I’ll end up taking more from it as I finalise the edit and put the spaces and pictorial sections back into it.
That’s the next job. To find all the parts of the story told at the moment by interviews which can be told better with pictures…
That’s the job for tomorrow- however, I also need to juggle my new documentaries too – there are people I need to email and shoots I need to set up. Particularly there’s the possibility that I can catch a whole group of my potential dinosaur experts for my new documentaries on the theropods (two legged meat eaters) at a conference in March.
If I can do a deal to shoot there, it’ll save a lot of time and energy rushing round the country later on.
Anyway – what is the collective name for a group of dinosaur experts?
An excavation, perhaps?
I’ve spent the last two days going through the documentary scripting it. It’s a hard job because I’ve got to string together the talking heads into some kind of story.
In doing the rough edit I’ve cut out all the waffle, and ordered the clips, dropping in a few cut-aways. Where I think narration is needed, I’ve inserted a simple text screen to give myself a visual cue as I cut and to make sure the doc is roughly the right length.
Going through and scripting is a slow and often painful job, and it’s not finished yet. This rough script I’ll record (using my own voice as a stand-in for the professional narrator) and drop in, then as I work towards a fine edit, I’ll refine the script.
I did write a preliminary script a couple of months ago to give the documentary some shape and guide me as I did the interviews. However, I’ve barely looked at it while writing this version, so I’m not really sure if I wasted my time doing it before.
I suppose the preliminary script did help to shape the production in my mind, but I could probably have got away with doing that in a less formal fashion. Having said that, when I look back, the original script (because it was written fast and without the restriction of having to fit it around people’s actual quotes) contains a lot of useful ideas and powerful quotes.
Perhaps I’ll end up taking more from it as I finalise the edit and put the spaces and pictorial sections back into it.
That’s the next job. To find all the parts of the story told at the moment by interviews which can be told better with pictures…
That’s the job for tomorrow- however, I also need to juggle my new documentaries too – there are people I need to email and shoots I need to set up. Particularly there’s the possibility that I can catch a whole group of my potential dinosaur experts for my new documentaries on the theropods (two legged meat eaters) at a conference in March.
If I can do a deal to shoot there, it’ll save a lot of time and energy rushing round the country later on.
Anyway – what is the collective name for a group of dinosaur experts?
An excavation, perhaps?
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