Even Worse Than We Had Hoped
    By Paul Spelman

These are culled from my own trial and error, and from advice given to me by Stephen Stock, a reporter now with WFOR-TV in Miami. They are not hard and fast “rules,” they’re mainly suggestions, and certainly don't apply to every story every time. Often you don’t have time to focus on all of these concepts. But I’ve found that when I do, the stories generally turn out better.

 

 

I've disregarded this suggestion many times, and almost always regret it later. The first shot should be a great shot, a "video lead" that grabs the viewers and makes them pay attention. Use your best shot or your second-best shot. If you’re doing a story about a blizzard, and the most arresting video you have is of a school bus sliding backwards down a hill, start with that. The last shot is of equal importance and should leave viewers with a lasting impression, a "this is what remains" shot.  The writing should also match the video very closely at the start and end of the story. This can actually make it easier to write the story. Find your best video and let it tell you what to say.

 

When I first started in TV, I tried to do it the other way around. I’d decide how I wanted to tell the story and then look for video to match. So for the blizzard, I might write: “The snow started falling around 11 a.m. and by noon it was coming down hard.” This meant I had to start with video showing a little bit of snow falling, and let that less-than-riveting b-roll run for a bit before I got to any of the better stuff. As they say in newspaper reporting, don’t bury the lead. Start with your best. For this reason, I generally don't like starting or ending with a soundbite, unless there's not much else good video and the soundbite is phenomenal.  If you start with a soundbite, it should be very short. Which brings me to my next suggestion ...

 

 

You're in an office, Nat[ural] sound of a restaurant, now you're at a restaurant. You don't need that much sound, just a second or two to make things lively and add pacing to a story. You can even use lack of sound for effect. One of my best uses of Nat sound involved near-silence as we showed pictures of hurricane devastation.

 

Nat sound is sometimes a pain to find or edit in, but the stories are usually better for it. But if you use Nat sound at the start of your story, make sure it's brief and it's obvious to the viewer what the sound is. If the Nat sound is too long at the start, the viewer starts wondering if there's something wrong with his TV set and wonders why the reporter isn’t talking. I prefer saying one quick sentence, just to let viewers know the story has started, and then pausing for Nat sound. So, for instance, my script might read

 

Reporter: This may be the most dangerous train crossing in the country.

SHORT NAT SOUND OF TRAIN GOING BY AT HIGH SPEED

Reporter: Tuesday’s deadly accident was the fourth fatal crash here this year …

 

As for soundbites, there's no set length, but I try and keep them shorter than fifteen seconds. I generally like them between five and eleven seconds. With just 75-90 seconds for a story, you don't have a lot of time to give away, and can almost always say things faster yourself.

 

 

News doesn't happen in a vacuum, so focus on people. A fire isn’t just there, it burns down someone’s house. If a tree falls in the forest, it may not be newsworthy if it didn’t hit anybody. Who's affected, who's involved? One useful technique is what I call the "human boomerang," in which you start with an individual, then go to the bigger issue, then "boomerang" back to the person. For instance, if the story is about drought affecting farmers, start with "Joe Farmer lost a third of his crops last week..." Then, since the story is about all farmers, not just Joe, provide details about how many farms are affected, how bad the drought is by historical standards, etc. Then, to bring a sense of closure and return to the human element, close by saying something like, "and if it doesn't rain soon, Joe could lose what little he has left. Reporting from the farmland, Paul Spelman, Eyewitness News …."

 

The only problem with this technique is that it can clash with suggestion #1 about using your best video first. A picture of Joe Farmer often isn't that exciting. So what you can do is show your best video of wilting corn and say "The corn on Joe Farmer's farm won't be going to harvest this year. (Cut to picture of despondent Joe) Joe lost a third of it last week..." Or something along those lines. Everything can be written to somehow.

 

Focusing on individuals also creates B-roll when you don't have much otherwise. If I’m doing a story about diabetes and don’t have video of malfunctioning pancreases or people injecting themselves with insulin, I can show video of someone walking around his house or driving his car so long as that person has diabetes and I’m focusing on that person’s story. I once did a story about a flu and cold epidemic that had shut down a school. What was I going to show for 90 seconds, empty classrooms? I went to a drugstore, found a lady buying medicine, and got video of her spooning cough syrup to her five sick grandkids. Then I showed a few empty classrooms, and a soundbite from the school super, before closing with more b-roll of sneezing children.

 

You can overuse the boomerang (I have), and it can get a bit hackneyed, so don’t view it as mandatory for every story, but it is effective.

 

 

Experts and officials are great for information, but pretty boring to most viewers, particularly since they usually don't have a personal stake in an issue. So get your info from the talking head (the Ag official who tells you how many farms are suffering from the drought) but go sparingly with their sound bites. I often include one official to lend some credibility to the information I’m providing, and then leave all the other soundbites to Joe Farmer and the other "real people."  Regular folks have better stories and better soundbites anyway. I’ve even interviewed officials on camera and then not aired any of their soundbites. I just paraphrased their information in my reporter voice track. The officials don’t always like that, but it can make for a better story.

 

Using fewer officials also makes it easier to physically obtain all the material for your stories, since you don't have to rely on an official fitting a filmed TV interview session into their busy schedules. You can get the info from the official over the phone, and then go find regular people for the B-roll and soundbites. And since one farmer or parent or flu victim is just as good as the next one, you can keep knocking on doors until you find someone home and available. Whereas with officials, there may only be one person you can talk to, and so if you need them on camera you are dependent on their physical availability.

 

 

For instance, if you're covering a murder trial, don't just show courtroom shots. Dig up video of the crime scene that was shot on the day of the murder. The same applies to meetings. Show as little meeting video as possible. If you’re covering the school board, show file video of kids in class, not shots of officials talking about them. Don’t use file video when you could have gotten good fresh video, just use file instead of boring video, or to show what happened on a specific date. My other suggestion is to not to use file video at the very start and end of a story, if possible. Because file didn’t occur that day, it has a certain staleness and can even be deceiving. For the most part, video at the beginning and end should be reserved for what happened today.

 

 

Pay close attention to the video, especially at the start and end of the story. Don't just wallpaper a story, make the words connect with the pictures. That doesn't mean reiterating precisely what the viewer is seeing, but the words and pictures should relate. Often just a tiny word change at the start of a sentence can make an entire paragraph fit the video. And as noted above, let the video determine what’s in the story, not the other way around. An example of this would be if you're doing a story on a flea market, and you want to say they had an enormous variety of goods. Look at your video, and if you have a shot of a laptop and another shot of a Chinese wok, then you can write that the flea market offered everything from computers to cooking gear ... . Don't fight the video, let it decide what to write about, and your story will usually be better. 

 

Another example of adapting to the video instead of fighting it would be if you were doing a story about how rains had caused dangerous structural damage to roads, but none of the damage was actually visible to the naked eye. So instead of despairing over the fact that you don’t have any good video of crumbling roadways, you show video of cars driving over the roads and say, “This roadway may look fine, but these cars may, in fact, be playing a game of Russian Roulette ….” Then go to file video of roads that had collapsed in the past, or something like that. 

 

 

Spoken numbers (“50% higher,” “354,000 tacos”) often fly right by the viewer if they have to compete with visuals. So if you’re reciting specific numbers, graphic animation will often best serve the viewers and the story, even if you have good video to show.  So if you’re doing a farm story, maybe start with your best b-roll of combines in the fields but use a graphic when you get to the “1.4 million farms are in foreclosure, with losses of nearly $16 billion” part. Graphics also fill space when you don’t have enough good video (“Incidents of diabetes are up 12% in the past 5 years”), and they’re useful for reading quotes when one side can’t, or won’t, talk on camera:

 

Johnson wouldn’t talk on camera, but issued a statement proclaiming

SHOW GRAPHIC OF QUOTE

“I’ve never bet on basketball and don’t even join my office pool for March Madness”

 

 

A stand-up shouldn't be there just to show the reporter, unless you really don't have any other b-roll. So do something: point, dig, pour, move, walk (if you can without walking out of the frame - in other words, if you’re not one-man banding) gesture with something, etc.  In one of my better stand-ups, I pushed my way out of a cornfield, held an ear of corn up to the camera and peeled it back to show that the kernels were perfect even though the corn was being thrown away because it was too late to harvest. For what it's worth, that stand-up probably got me a job in Knoxville.

 

Also, I prefer stand-ups as bridges in the middle of stories rather than as closers, because that way your closing shot can be a really good b-roll image that leaves viewers with a lasting impression (see suggestion #1 above), rather than with a view of the reporter talking. Many news directors have told me that they agree. For live shots, obviously, you don’t have a choice.

 

This keeps the story moving along at a nice pace, and tends to keep the overall length of the story shorter. It is most important to do this within the first few sentences of the start, but I generally try to keep this pace throughout the rest of the story as well.  So I may go two sentences of script – soundbite – three sentences of script – Nat sound – one sentence of script – soundbite, etc. The most I’ll ever go without a soundbite or Nat sound break is four sentences of reporter track (except in truly unusual circumstances, such as if no one would talk on camera, or I had to recite a long quote word for word etc.), and usually I keep it to two or three.

 

10) And lastly, try to keep your stories focused on one main issue. 

 

In a 90-second story, trying to explain multiple issues is next to impossible, and only confuses the viewers. So keep it focused, keep it short, and if you wonder if it's confusing, it probably is.

 

 

That's about it. Remember these are just suggestions, not rules. I have broken every one of these for one reason or another, and everyone writes their stories differently. There are no rules that you can't break if it will make the story better. But I've found that for the most part, when I do break one of these, I look back later and wish that I hadn't.